Electric Guitar Lessons

If you’re just graduating out of acoustic and into electric guitar lessons then you’re in for an exciting time. A lot of students begin learning guitar on acoustic as a kind of right of passage while all the time keeping their ultimate goal of playing electric rock guitar squarely in their sights. It’s a very common road to journey down and one which has been travelled by millions of guitar players the world over.

When you were learning to play acoustic style guitar you were probably focused upon the basics of chords and strumming, keeping time and some elementary scales among other things. The move into taking electric guitar lessons however will open up an entire new world of sonic colour for you through the wide range of effects, amps and playing techniques available. It’s a big new musical universe and it can seem daunting at first.

Now all of a sudden you feel like you’ve really earned the right play electric guitar having served your dues on acoustic first. You’ll probably find some things such as chords and arpeggio picking a little easier to perform on electric guitar since it tends to be easier to press the strings down due to lower actions on the guitars and substantially thinner strings. There are however also many new challenges which you’ll need to get to grips with if you wish to be able to play all those famous riffs and songs you‘ve been hearing.

I would recommend that you should begin simply with electric guitar lessons and look to cover the basics first. Try not to be too intimidated by that big guitar fretboard as once your scales and modes, your keys and barre chords are put into some logical sense through well established patterns you’ll find that it all starts to fit together in a very logical way. From there it’s all about enough practice to learn it deeply enough that eventually you can forget all about it and simply play from the heart. At least that’s the theory!

A great starting point for lessons on electric guitar are power chords. They are short form and compact chords consisting of just the root note, fifth and sometimes the octave. They are moveable shapes and quite easy to do once your fingers learn to stretch the distance they require which is relatively small compared to many other moveable chords shapes. The real kick comes when you introduce distortion and are able to freely move your power chords up and down the fretboard along with the two lines of the low E and A strings.

Once you have mastered this basic level of electric guitar an enormous wealth of songs will suddenly become available for you to play and you’ll discover that some bands don’t use anything else but them to make record after record after record. In tandem with power chords you should also learn to palm mute as this will give your rhythm playing some real definition and punch. Being able to take your palm mute on and off at will is one of the core techniques of playing rhythmical electric guitar. The key is to learn how to apply just the right amount of pressure and where on the guitar to do it.

For some of the coolest electric guitar lessons around you should check out Famous Riffs which will teach you how to play lots of the greatest and most famous guitar riffs of all time.