learn-guitar.org

Well my Stratocaster arrived yesterday via UPS. As I wrote in my “New Stratocaster” post, this was a bit of a spur of the moment purchase. I mean, I have been thinking about getting a guitar, and I have beenb leaning towards getting a Strat, but I wasn’t exactly planning on buying a guitar when I walked into the store…

At first it sounded like I was going to want to get an American Deluxe Stratocaster, since it had a humbucker pickup to go with the two single coil pickups. But I just liked the sound of the single coils better, so I started to lean more towards the American Standard Strat.

Then I tried out the Stevie Ray Vaughn Strat (with the “SRV") on the pick guard. I really liked the sound of that guitar, but the action was really high… and I am not much of a fan of high action on my guitars. I guess that Stevie Ray liked his action set up pretty high, so this guitar was true to the namesake, but that ain’t for me.

I suppose I could have had the action lowered, but I also really didn’t like that fancy pickguard… a little too fancy for someone like me who struggles to do ANYTHING on a guitar.

In any case, I ended up with the American Standard Strat, and it just showed up at my door - I didn’t want to carry it on the plane ride home, so I had them ship it for me. My Strat came all boxed up and bubble wrapped - and it was in its Fender hardshell case… everything was in perfect order when it showe up.

Stratocaster guitar,
electric guitar

Wow… I found some cool free guitar videos. This looks like great stuff for learning guitar. I haven’t been through all of it yet, but I wanted to put up a blog post - this way I know I won’t lose this link, I can always come back here to find the link to these videos.

It can be hard to focus on what you want to learn on your guitar, there are so many great resources.
Jamorama is still just about my favorite. And I also like the Principles. And Guitar From Scratch.

But it is really cool to find guitar videos like this… especially for free. The only problem is something seems to be really messed up when I try to play the videos. The audio part is all broken up… don’t know what is going wrong. I am going to assume that it is either my connection or my computer - I just wish I could see these videos OK.

They are quicktime videos… and I think I am setup OK for quicktime videos (I am running Windows XP Pro) - they load ok, and I can see them - this guy is shredding away on his guitar), and I can hear them… but the sound is way messed up.

File under: learn guitar,Jamorama
, guitar video

After my last post about barre chords, I found this really cool video at Ultimate-Guiter.com. The video is basically a tutorial on how to play barre chords, and it is oriented towards beginners.

Check out the video on barre chords here.

This is the amazing thing about learning to play guitar in the age of the internet… I can’t imagine trying to learn to play guitar before you could download tabs, lessons, and entire courses about guitar.

I am pretty amped about this barre chord video… I just downloaded it and played it through for the first time. The download is huge - 35 megabytes, but it was worth it. As I mentioned before, I was just starting in on these barre chords, so this is pretty cool to come across a free video on how to play barre chords.

tags: guitar chords,
learn to play guitar
,
barre chords

OK, I am not the biggest country music fan… but Folsom Prison Blues is not your average country song. It is a really killer song, and I would love to learn to play it on my guitar“>. No problem… right? The guitar chords are super easy, even for a beginner like me.

The real problem is in the strum pattern, at least for me. However, I found a killer video online that shows a couple of different ways to do the strum pattern for Folsom Prison Blues.

This isn’t a professional video, it is just guy with a blog and a video camera. The video shows how to do the alternating bass picking strum style (also known as Carter picking). It is really cool, even though I am still struggling to really get the technique down.

In fact, there are really two videos… one that gives a pretty simple guitar strum pattern, and one that gives an even simpler pattern. Be sure to check it out.