Desi Serna

Learning to play the guitar is a lot fun. Use this cheat sheet to help you get started with your guitar finger placement and guitar chords. If you need help with finger placement on your guitar, use tablature (tab) and fingerboard diagrams.Practice playing the most common open-position chords on your guitar to get that “jangly” sound, and make sure you know the notes on the neck of your guitar to change starting notes in scales, chords, and arpeggios.

Guitar theory is an area of study that explains how you can play, improvise, and compose popular music on the guitar fretboard — and why certain elements of music go together the way they do.Dive into guitar theory by exploring a fretboard diagram showing notes along the 6th and 5th strings; some major scale patterns; Roman numerals and the major/minor chord sequence; and mode names.

This Cheat Sheet has some handy tips that you can keep in your practice area for quick reference.Use these techniques to review your basic rhythms and warm up your hands at the beginning of a playing session. Before you begin, trim and file the nails on your fretting hand so that nothing comes between your fingertips and the strings.

As you explore guitar theory, you'll learn that the major scale is a series of notes played in an ascending and descending fashion. Guitarists use the major scale to play melodies, riffs, solos, and bass lines. Additionally, it's used to play intervals, build chords, and chart progressions. The following samp

A scale is a series of notes played one at a time in an ascending or descending fashion. Guitarists use scales to play melodies, riffs, lead guitar solos, and bass lines. Different types of scales make different patterns on the fretboard that you have to learn and practice. In popular music, the two most commonly used types of scales are the pentatonic scale and the major scale.

Guitar players must know the notes on the fretboard to keep track of the specific scale patterns and chords they play all over the neck. But rather than memorize every single note in every fret on every string, guitarists do better to just know the natural notes along the 6th and 5th strings. After all, most scale patterns and chord shapes are rooted on these strings.

On the guitar, different C form chord voicings are played by breaking down the arpeggio pattern into smaller, fragmented pieces. Here are several ways to play partial chord shapes based on the full C form. In these examples, you fret and pick only the black dots. The numbers in the black dots are suggested fingerings.