How to play Guitar
by David Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand
the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings
play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning
end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and
if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to
it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people
use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned
all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore
the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one
day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and
skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar
and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings
on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of
the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What
ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning
pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong.
But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re
the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound.
In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re
all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple
of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound
so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs
on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with
an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings
can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10,
you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster,
but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs
are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out
with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess
they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty
foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to
feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other
and with a tiny movement rule the world.