The difficult thing about guitar chords is not constructing and remembering them. It’s changing chords that is actually complicated. Chords have to be changed fast and with precision, all fingers moving simultaneously towards their new place while changing chords. You know it anyway. But how to achieve that? Let’s start with these two chords: The first and the second finger… Continue reading
A (guitar)teacher should always know more than the students and often this is the case. However, young people crawl around the Web, talk to many people and have opinion on everything. How to beat them? The only way is to keep reading. Education is a life-time process and if you give up, you’ll be in… Continue reading
The most common way to learn to play the guitar or any other instrument is to get a good teacher and attend lessons. Of course, you should practice on your own between lessons. Lesson is just a short happy occasion when you meet your teacher, get your homework evaluated and what else? Let’s see what… Continue reading
If you play mostly chords on the guitar then probably you haven’t heard or thought about the legato technique on the guitar – hammer ons and pull offs. Once you need to play the melody then those techniques are essential. Legato means to join the notes smoothly and this term is used most often in… Continue reading
A common aspect of the guitar playing technique that causes much trouble is playing the scales at fast tempos. Arpeggios and chords are more convenient so those problems seem more realistic to overcome. But what to do with the scales? Specially when plucking strings with fingers not a pick. About how fast tempos are we… Continue reading
Everyone who’s ever been to a school knows that he or she is not the only student in the classroom. In bad cases you may be one of 40 but if we take an average countryside school here in Estonia, you may be lucky enough to study together with less than 10 classmates. But what… Continue reading
Let’s go on with the guitar playing technique and I was previously talking about an important part of the techique – the playing mechanics. So what is a good material for developing your mechanics? The term “playing mechanics” came prominently to my mind unfortunately when I already had done my BA degree in classical guitar… Continue reading
Unlike pianists, we, the guitarists have to carry our instrument from place to place every day. Some of us carry it to school, some to band gigs, some to recitals etc. We transport the guitars on our shoulders, in cars, on planes, trains and ships. Not to mention the bikes and bicycles. Who knows how… Continue reading
Every child knows that there are six strings on the guitar. But is it alwasy like this? In fact, there are numerous examples of guitars that have more or even less strings. Sometimes there is a clear reason for that but not always. Let’s clear it up a bit. When I talk about the history… Continue reading
Almost every day I have to explain people what exactly is the difference between the classical and the acoustic guitar. The fact that I have touched the topic in every guitar book that I have written does not make it any easier. Let’s now try with a very compact video: