The Electric Guitar Handbook: A Complete Course in Modern Technique and Styles

(left).

Part 1

The guitar

The basics

Fretted notes

The higher strings

The lower strings

Scales and keys

Rhythm guitar

SECTION ONE

the guitar

Familiarize yourself with the names of the different parts of the guitar (next page). It will help you to find your way around once we start playing some music.

THE HANDS

For most players the left hand frets the strings on the neck while the right hand plucks the strings down near the bridge. In deference to left-handed players (who often choose to do things the other way around) we shall refer in this book to fretting hand and picking hand. If you are left-handed and have not yet bought a left-handed guitar you might consider learning to play right-handed. After all, there is no such thing as a left-handed violin, a left-handed flute or, come to that, a left-handed piano. So there’s no reason why one hand should necessarily be better at picking than fretting. The main advantage of learning to play right-handed is that there is a much larger range of right-handed instruments in any music store than left-handed instruments. As you progress, and wish to trade up, the choice of instruments for a right-handed player is much larger. You’ll also be able to pick up any guitar and play it as if it was your own — a luxury that players of left-handed guitars have to forgo.

STANDING

When standing it’s important to carry the weight of the guitar on your shoulder and across your back. A good-quality adjustable strap is essential; one that doesn’t slip around is best. Don’t have the strap too long; a good basic rule is that your fretting-hand wrist should be higher than its elbow. This can be a problem, as straps always seem to be made for giants. Check this before you buy.

SITTING

Practicing sitting down is less tiring than practicing standing up, and will allow you to put in the hours necessary to achieve superhero status. I recommend it very strongly. Once again it is a good idea to use a strap to keep the guitar neck up. Around a 45-degree angle is ideal. On no account should you let the neck dip below the horizontal; not only is the guitar extremely difficult to play with the neck too low, but there is also a risk of injury as you strain to get your hands in the right positions.

USING THE PICK

The examples in this book are all intended for the standard six-string electric guitar, played with a pick. The vast majority of the examples can also be effectively played on a steel-string acoustic, or even on a nylon-string classical-style guitar, and can be played fingerstyle (ie, using the fingers and thumb of the picking hand instead of a pick) if required.

1998 FENDER RELIC 60S STRATOCASTER finished in Daphne Blue

The Fender Stratocaster was first introduced in 1954 and has remained the first choice for a solidbodied guitar among a huge number of professional and amateur players. This Relic Series guitar is a recent faithful copy of the classic early 60s instrument. Often the originals from this period are deemed too valuable to take out on the road, which makes this particular series a popular and affordable option for players.

1 TUNERS, also referred to as machine heads. These stell post both secure the string and allow tuning adjustements. On this guitar they are ranged along one side of the headstock; this configuration is known as six-a-side.

2 STRING RETAINER, sometimes called the string true. This metal clip pulls the B- and top E-strings downwards at a sharper angle than might be offered when the string goes around the post. Guitars made with angled headstocks don’t have this particular

3 NUT the rut is a small but crucial piece of hardwere that allows the six strings to be accurately spaced and set for the correct height and maximum playability.

4 NECK The neck on this instrument is cut from maple with a separate fingerboard made from rosewood. The fingerboard is glued over a slot cut into the neck to accommodate the adjustable metal truss rod. Other materials used for fingerboards include maple and ebony

5 FRETS Fret wire can be made from a variety of materials. In this case it is made froom a hardwearmg alloy of nickel and silver. The number of frets on a fingerboard varies but is most commonly 22 or 24.

6 STRINGS Commonly made from nickel with the three low strings being nickel wound around a steel core. Some strings are made from stainless steel or they can be nickel plated. All strings are availlable in a wide variety of weights or gauges

7 POSITION MARKERS These inlayed reference points indicate fret positions to help the players find their way around the guitar’s fingerboard. these markers are plain dots, but they can be various shapes known as block markers. They are often made from mother of pearl or abalone shell.

8 NECK PLATE The neck plate is situated at the rear of the guitar where the neck joins the body. It provides a simple platform of metal through which pass the four screws that join the neck to the body. These plates often have the instrument’s serial number stamped into them. Guitars with bolt-on necks have this type of fixing, but not instruments withset or plued-innecks.

9 BODY Materials for solidbody guitarsvary widely. In this example the body is cut from a slab of alder with pre-routed holes to accommodate the pickups wiring and controls. The slot that is cut to accept the neck is referred to as the neck pocket.

10 PICKGUARD, also known as the scratchplate. This has the function of protecting the body from plactrum strokes and covering the holes cut for the electronics. Pickguards are usually made from plastic, sometimes laminated in contrasting colors.

11 PICKUPS The pickup selector changes the sound of the guitar, each pickup sounds different because of its location. The bridge pickup sounds bright and trebly because it is near the bridge, where bright sounds predominate owing to the tightness of the string near to its anchoring point. The neck pickup sounds full and rounded because the looser string in this area accentuates the lower frequencies. Many of the musical examples suggest a pickup setting for your guitar.

12 CONTROLS The volume control adjusts how much guitar signal is going into your amplifier, and for now is probably best left on maximum as guitars usually sound best that way. Similarly the tone controls on most guitars just roll off treble and again are probably best left on maximum.

13 VIBRATO called the tremolo, this is a bridge and/or tailpiece that alters the pitch of the strings when the arm is depressed. This unit sits on a spring loaded block that passes through the body and returns the strings to pitch.

14 FINISH A high-gloss lacquer is used on body, This reissue has the paintwork distressed in the factory to give it the appearance of an older used instrument it is part of Fender’s Relic Series of guitars.

TUNING

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Let’s start by getting your guitar in tune. There are guitar tuning notes on the audio files (Track 1), but a better alternative is to buy yourself an electronic tuner. Tuners come in all shapes and sizes. They are not expensive, and some of them even clip on to the guitar and work without needing to be plugged in, which is great for acoustic. Most modern tuners recognize the string you’re tuning automatically, and use a system of lights or a needle to indicate whether the string is sharp or flat. Follow each string back to its tuning peg so that you know which one to adjust — and which way to turn it to go higher (sharp) or lower (flat). At this stage it is more important to play the guitar than to tune it, so don’t spend ages trying to get the tuning absolutely perfect. Spend a few minutes tuning the guitar every day, and then move on to your practicing. Your ability to tune the guitar accurately will improve with practice as we go along. If you’re using an electronic tuner and you start to get erratic readings it’s a sign that the battery may need replacing.

THE BASICS

Let’s make a start, playing some basic guitar and understanding how guitar music is written. Have a look at the example below.

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EXERCISE 1/ Open-string notes

Music is written on a stave. In this case the top stave has five lines and is for standard musical notation, or ‘dots’ as musicians often call it. Notes can be written on the lines or in the spaces, and low or high notes that do not fit on the stave are accommodated by adding extra lines, called ledger lines. The six notes written here are the open strings of the guitar — the six sounds that the guitar makes without using the fretting hand. Beginning with the lowest sounding string, and progressing across to the highest sounding string, they are called E A D G B E. That is not particularly easy to remember at this stage, but you could try saying ‘Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears’ and the first letter of each word will give you the name of the string. At the beginning of the stave is a ‘clef’; in this case a ‘treble clef’ or ‘G clef,’ which sets the overall range of the stave by circling around the second line up and fixing that note as G.

For now, just repeat the names out loud as you play each note with a downstroke of the pick: E-A-D-G-B-E.

Then try playing along with the audio files. The track begins with four clicks to show you when to come in, and each note lasts for four clicks. The clicks carry on in the background — you should count them ‘one — two — three — four.’ This introduces the idea of ‘pulse’ — the steady background beat that underlies virtually all music.

The lower stave has six lines and works in a completely different way. The word ‘tab’ at the beginning is short for tablature, and in tablature each line represents a different string of the guitar. The lowest line is your thickest, lowest sounding string. Just remember low-sounding notes are found at the bottom of the stave and high-sounding notes at the top of the stave. In tablature, an open string is notated by a zero written on the line. As we shall see when we come to play notes on the frets, which fret to play is indicated by a number written on the line.

THEORY

As well as being named after letters of the alphabet, the strings are numbered. Your high E-string is also called your first string, your B-string is your second string, and so on, across to your sixth string, which is your low E.

THEORY

In naming musical sounds we just use the first seven letters of the alphabet: A B C D E F G. Clearly there are more than seven notes on the guitar, so after G we just begin again on A. We’ll return to this subject later.

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EXERCISE 2/ Counting beats

Have a listen to Audio track 3 and see Exercise 2 (opposite page). To begin with, you will hear four evenly spaced clicks. Each of these clicks is called a beat and would be written using this sign, which is called a quarter-note or crotchet:

All musicians have to count beats when they are learning music. We would count these ‘one — two — three — four,’ and if you look at the music you will see that it is divided up into groups of four beats by vertical lines, which are known as bar lines. In this case we have six bars of music; the word ‘measure’ is sometimes used instead of bar but the terms are interchangeable, and in this book we will stick to bar.

After we’ve finished counting our four clicks (this bit is called ‘the count-in’) we join in playing each open string four times. Notice this sign, which tells you to use a downstroke:

Its opposite is this sign, which tells you to use an upstroke:

We’ll stick to downstrokes for now. The word ...sim means ‘carry on in the same way’ and saves us having to write more downstroke signs than is necessary.

At the beginning of the notation stave you will see the sign that looks like this:

This is called the time signature, and it tells us that this piece is in 4/4, meaning there are four quarter-notes in every bar. Of course, in this case we knew that already — but there are not always four beats in a bar, and this sign can warn us what to expect.

THEORY

Once we start grouping beats together in patterns of strong or weak beats we move beyond ‘pulse’ and begin dealing with ‘meter.’ A pulse is a steady even beat, whereas a meter has a regular louder or accented beat as the first of each group. Four is the most common meter and is the one used for most popular music, but you could have any number of beats per