Welcome to the Online Guitar Tutorial

There are only two things that you need to have in order to learn how to play the guitar:

The desire to learn

a guitar (yours, preferably..)

Section 1 -- Getting Started
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Guitar Basics
1.3 Musical Basics
1.4 Guitar Strings
1.5 Tuning the Guitar

Section 2 -- Introduction to Chords
2.1 Chord Basics
2.2 Chord Diagrams

Section 3 -- Song Structures
3.1 Musical Scales

Appendix - Other Resources
A.1 Guitar Dan's homepage

Questions and comments

1.1 Introduction

So are we ready to begin? ok. First things first. This tutorial is designed to be fun. If you are having a really difficult time with a certain part, just move on and come back to that part later. The best way (in fact, the only way) to learn how to play a musical instrument is through practice that you enjoy! Please don't slog your way through musical scales until you hate them. Learn a song and then develop the desire to learn the scales so you can then play the melody to that song. What is most important is to enjoy yourself as much as possible. Picking up a musical instrument can be a frustrating experience, but it can also be a very rewarding one. On to the tutorial.

1.2 Guitar Basics

First, we need to take some time to get to know the parts of the guitar. The guitar I will be referring to in the following sections is an acoustic 6-string guitar. If you are right handed, you hold the guitar so your right hand is the strumming hand (it rests on the strings above the hole on the body of the guitar). Your left hand is then the picking hand, which rests on the neck of the guitar.

The large wooden part of the guitar is referred to as the "body" while the thin piece that is connected to the body is called the "neck." The strings run from the "bridge" which is on the body of the guitar (near the hole in the body) and connect to the "tuning pegs" which are on the "head" of the guitar.

The metal pieces that lie along the neck at seemingly random intervals are the "frets" and the neck is sometimes referred to as the "fretboard." The six strings are pressed onto the fretboard by the player's hand, which shortens the part of the string allowed to vibrate when plucked, which changes the pitch of the string. So (again, I speak for a right handed player, just reverse right and left for left handed player) the player's left hand frets combinations of strings against the fretboard, while the right hand plucks or strums the strings to cause them to vibrate.

1.3 Musical Basics

The modern western musical scale consists of 12 tones (the 13th tone is an "octave" of the first tone) These tones are denoted with the letters A through G as well as the symbols "sharp," "flat," and "natural." For example the 12 tones could be written as:
A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#
The next tone in the preceding scale would be "A" again. This second "A" is called an "octave" of the first "A". Mathematically, this means that the second "A" note is vibrating at twice the frequency as the first "A" note. The result of this is that the two notes sound the same except that the second one has a higher pitch. This will make more sense as the tutorial progresses. Music works in a very mathematical fashion. (as strange as that may seem) A "Note" with a "pitch" is simply a sound wave traveling through the air at a certain frequency. The way that these waves interact with each other lead us to what we call music.

The most important thing to understand is the fact that there are 12 tones and they repeat after the 12th tone. (after the G# comes the A). The study of musical theory is a vast and expansive subject matter, the purpose of this is to give you enough background to continue the tutorial. The concept of "musical steps" is important as well. A half step in musical terms refers to one note that follows another note (or one fret difference on the guitar). A and A# are an example of a half step. A whole step in musical terms refers to a difference of two tones (two frets on the guitar). A and B are examples of a whole step. Be careful when figuring whole steps versus half steps. Some musical letter tones do not have these "sharp" tones in between them. For example A and B are a whole step apart, but B and C are only a half step apart (as are E and F). If this seems confusing, it will become clear shortly.

1.4 The strings

There are six strings on most guitars (12 on others), and they are tuned from the lowest string (the string closer to the top of the guitar as it rests in your lap.) to the highest string as: E, A, D, G, B, E Which leads to the following scatter of notes on the fretboard (realize that two notes with the same name may not be the same pitch, but could be "octaves" of each other-- an example is the lowest and highest strings which are two octaves apart.)

1.5 Tuning the Guitar

As you may have realized from the previous picture, the same note can be played on different strings (although the two notes may be octaves). This leads to a relatively simple way of tuning the guitar. Once one of the strings of the guitar is in tune (either with a nearby piano, or by ear) the all other strings can be tuned from this string. To tune the A string from the low E string, for example, the player would fret the low E string on the fifth fret (making it sound as an A note) and compare this tone to the A string. The player would then turn the tuning peg that the A string is connected to until the two pitches sound the same. The same method works for all other strings, except when tuning the B string from the G string. In this case the player would fret the fourth fret. This is illustrated below: