When you first start on the idea of exploring guitar lessons, you hardly know what to expect. Perhaps even less, do you know how to answer when your instructor asks you “what your goals are”. It’s hard to express what “ideas” you have about playing guitar if you don’t have the proper guitar vocabulary to express it.
We put together this article to help you understand some of the basic concepts you can pursue with your guitar lessons. We hope that it will help you communicate with your guitar instructor on what “your goals are” or what you would like to pursue in your lessons.
Strumming Vs Picking
These are two basic ways to play the guitar.
Strumming is all about dragging a guitar pick up and down across some or all of the strings. With strumming you learn strum patterns that tell you how many ups and how many down strums you do and in what pattern. There are many different kinds of strum patterns depending on the groove of the music you want to learn to play.
With strumming, you are more likely going to be playing chords off of chord charts. Your teacher should teach you how to read chord charts during your guitar lessons. You can imagine chords being like held hand positions where your fingers are pressing down on certain strings on the neck of the guitar and holding them for a certain amount of time while you strum with your other hand. This style of playing guitar is often called “rhythm guitar”.
Picking, on the other hand, requires a lot more practice and development of finger coordination. This is because with one hand you are using your finger tips to pluck guitar strings to create a melody. With the other hand you are either holding down chords as mentioned above with strumming or you are ALSO moving single fingers along the neck of the guitar which gets you more of a melody style of playing. We call this style of playing “lead guitar”.
Tabs Vs Note-reading
Next, there are two popular types of guitar notation you can learn to read. Reading notation allows you to learn new music on your own beyond your guitar lessons and teacher. They are called “guitar tabs” or “guitar music”. This looks like traditional musical notation that you would use, say, for playing piano, or cello, or violin.
Both accomplish the job of tell you what to play and how to play it. Tabs are a more modern version of notating music than traditional musical notation. That being said, there are bonuses to learning traditional music notation. First, you could then apply that knowledge to any other instrument if you decide to learn other instruments down the road. Second, learning traditional music notation will also help you relate and communicate with other musicians who read in that notation style as well. Here are image examples of the two notation styles.
Start Your Guitar Lessons!
Hopefully these basic concepts have given you a basic idea of what you would like to pursue with your time with a guitar teacher. It really is a fun journey to come out of the other side of your invested time with the ability to create music. Similarly, it is also a fun journey learning the tools for expanding your skills even beyond your lesson times! Good Luck!