This Should Be Everyone’s First Guitar Lesson

what's up everyone Mike here from the art of guitar today I want to show you a guitar lesson an introductory guitar lesson that I used to do back in the old days when I taught 60 students a week and for a while I was feeling very fortunate because I had so many students and I thought it'd probably be kind of cool to offer one free lesson a week to just some random student and if they sign up or not it didn't really matter to me because I was pretty full anyway but I realized that with this particular lesson sequence so many people learned so much in the first lesson that they always wanted to sign up I had about a 99 percent return rate which is really cool so what I want to do is I want to show you what that lesson is and if you're teaching guitar this can help you maybe show you what to teach in the first lesson at least what I do and then if you're a student you can and you're just starting out you could just learn the lesson for free right here okay I always want to make sure you're sitting up straight a lot of people hold the guitar you know in the beginning and they sort of slouch back like that so just make sure the guitar is sitting on your lap and I prefer to put it if you're right-handed on my right leg like this some people you'll see do this this is more of a classical way to hold the guitar some shredders do this as well it's a good idea but I prefer you do this that when you stand up and play it'll pretty much be in the same spot okay as far as are just holding onto the guitar what I like to do is I like to take my form and sort of rest it on the body and it balances itself if you do that most of the time and then as far as just the fretting hand what I always tell people to do is to write now for the most part keep your thumb behind the neck so it's gonna be more like this and there's a line on the back of my guitar that's helpful but I just want your fingers to be very free when we do our first little exercise okay later on the thumb can come over the top that does happen but for today try to keep it in the back for the most part okay and then as far as holding the pick this is all pretty quick I go more into detail on the website but I'm just going to go through it a little bit quicker today I want this to fit in the half hour lesson time okay so if you take up that your guitar pick and hold it at the nose like that and then your other hand make sort of the okay sim sign with your hand like this go like that with your first finger and put it over your thumb and then stick the pick in like this this is what I like to do you might think well the pics sticking out like sideways right but when you point it towards you like this suddenly the pic the nose of it's pointing right at the guitar some people think you're supposed to have the pic going pointing along with where your thumbs pointing but then if you bring it to the guitar you have to do this to make it work which doesn't make sense so make sure the nose of the pic is pointing towards you and you've got this sort of thing going on you can curl your you can kind of make a fist don't really clench like that I sort of leave my fingers dangling like that okay then what you want to do is you just want to start to strum the strings a little bit just get a feel for that what I tell people is to take your wrist and rotate it like that kind of like you're you know doing this with your hand versus your whole arm moving like that you don't want to be this person okay it's hard it's a hard habit to break so you don't want to start it okay so let's go ahead and just take the pic and let it fall down through the strings like this okay so some people ask if you should go up at this point you can but it's a little bit tricky because the pic might feel like it's getting stuck okay so what I like to do is if I do do an upstroke I do like a sweeping motion right till pick slightly so that he'll come up the strings in a good way okay if you don't tilt the pic easily get stuck in the strings you notice you could do that without even using your fretting hand yet your left hand if you're right-handed just the forearms holding the guitar in place and you're strumming through some guitars are so well balanced like my it's pretty good you could just take your forearm off and still do it but there are a lot of guitars especially if you put the tuner at the top where it starts to dip down okay so you might be wondering you're holding the guitar you're strumming you kind of know how to have your left hand a little bit you know the thumb in the back shouldn't you tune your guitar first a lot of people ask that but in the first lesson I don't like to spend a lot of time tuning because if you spend all that time teaching the student how to tune the whole lessons done by the time you're done you know what I mean if you're explaining each string and then how to bring it up higher or lower and what to do and then their first lesson they go I didn't really go home with much you know or at least it's gonna seem that way so I usually tune their guitar for them and since I'm not physically there to tune your guitar for you like I would do at a real lesson this is the hardest part of trying to teach online is I don't know what your guitar sounds like so it could be way out of tune what I recommend is either bring it to another guitar player who knows how to tune or a guitar store and just have them tune it now probably will go out of tune a little bit but at least you'll be in the ballpark you know what I'll actually do for you guys too is on the art of guitar website I'll make that one lesson open to the public so that if you want to go look for it it'll be called tuning with an electric tuner electronic tuner and you could do it from there teaching you how to tune using the fifth fret method takes a lot longer and there's way more involved with it so we'll skip that for now but if you want to do the electronic tuner lesson on the website for free go right ahead the string names are important to know right away because I'm gonna be referring to them today so I like to say EAD GBE I go in that order so I'll go from the thickest string to the skinniest then I say to remember a lot of people think Eddie ate dynamite good bye Eddie and because it's a mnemonic device that call that it's really easy to remember because you just remember that little saying Eddie ate dynamite good bye Eddie and you're good you've learned the names of the string so you know there's six of them now and you know how to hold your pick how to strum a little bit and how to sit your posture should be like this okay if you start to slouch remember you don't want to set that in motion right away you want to sort of stand sit up straight so that when you play live you're not like this okay plus it's easier on your back okay I like to jump right in and have the student just start playing notes all right I don't mess around I don't sit there and try to teach them how to read music right away obviously I didn't teach how to tune right away so we're getting right into playing and then you really start to feel what it's like to actually play the guitar and you get more excited about it all right so let's do this when I say the first string on the guitar I'm talking about the skinniest string so I want you to take your pick and just pluck the first string okay if you remember our little saying that's Eddie so it's going to be e that is the e note okay so what I want you to do is practice just picking down strokes on that one string so go like this so you can also do this without your fretting hand you just do this for a while get used to the feel of plucking a string okay now our fretting hands getting a little restless we got to get it into the party a little bit let's go ahead and we're gonna count up these strange-looking boxes okay these are called frets on the guitar these metal bars but today to make it simple I'm gonna refer to each of these boxes as frets and we're gonna count up a certain amount all right so if you start counting this would be one two three four five and so on all the way up to my guitar goes to 22 so what I want you to do is I want you to count up to five so one two three four five on the skinny string okay and all I want you to do is place your pointer finger your index finger in that box on the skinny string and we're gonna do is we're going to push down a little bit until the string touches the middle bar that's right here that's all it takes to make a note actually so there's a couple quick little tips here be sure to use your fingertip speaking of tips press down or it's called fretting right behind the metal bar right behind the fret okay not on the metal bar not in the middle of the box but right here this is the best spot right here and then use just enough pressure to make that happen all right now hold that down take your pick and just pluck that note alright hopefully hear a difference from when you played an open string let's try an open string once now let's go back to pressing down I kind of hate to say that fretting the fifth fret of the first string hear the difference okay so now we're gonna do that picking thing we did earlier with the open string with this note fretted so just play it four times with me ready go one two three four now don't push super hard otherwise your fingers gonna hurt you're gonna have this huge line on your finger and it's just not gonna feel good alright so and it's connecting us on the best so really just use enough pressure to make it happen you'll know if it's too little pressure too much you'll just start to feel that pain a little bit and you'll push the string out of tune eventually all right now don't lift off your finger I don't want you guys to go like this when you go to the next note instead what I want you to do is keep that there as an anchor so you sort of have your hand anchored right here take your middle finger and place it on the fret next to it so the sixth fret we're still on the skinny string the first string okay so now we have the fifth fret and the sixth fret push down and really only the sixth frets gonna make a noise so it's whatever finger is closest to your pick it's gonna affect the sound so let's go ahead and play that note now so take your pick and pluck it by the way you might notice when I'm holding my pick I'm not holding it so close to the nose of it that I can't get the pick to hold the string and this is more common I'm not holding it so far away that it feels like it's gonna fall out on my hand that's a terrible feeling it's just kind of in the middle if not more towards the nose but I still have enough to make the note happen without it feeling like it's flopping all over the place okay so let's do four of the sixth fret note okay ready go one two three four now we could do this fun little game we go back to the first finger four times on the fifth fret go one two three four put the middle finger back down four times go one two three four okay you could probably guess what's next the ring finger now an important thing is to keep these fingers curved because you really want your finger tips to be doing most of the work okay if you're flat it's not good you want to keep them curved as much as possible if your hand starts to hurt make sure you sort of relax it you can always do hand stretches which we go into deeply on the website finger yoga I call it but for today you should be okay we're not gonna do too much alright now we're gonna have the ring finger the third finger still on the skinniest string okay but this time on the seventh fret so we have five six seven right in a row let's play that four times go one two three four and just to speed things up the next one of course is gonna be the pinky I think he's gonna feel the weakest so give it some some time to develop let's do that one four times go 1 2 3 4 so we're starting a warm-up exercise without any wood even knowing it it's called the spider exercise we're gonna go one two three four finger wise but we're gonna play each of them four times each okay let's start from the beginning first finger go 1 2 3 4 place your second finger down next to it go third finger pinky a lot of people think you should go backwards at first I wouldn't do that until maybe later lessons we do do more expanded spider exercise on the website but not today what I want you to do instead is once you can do that move to the second string and do the exact same thing so I'm gonna speed it up you don't have to then of course the third string see everything sequences now if you want to stop at the third-string that's totally fine going to the fourth fifth and sixth strings can be a little bit tough on the wrists at first because you're not used to this feeling so I want you to relax before your wrists are started a little bit you don't want that happening you don't want wrist pain right off the bat okay so the least that you should be able to do after the first lesson is at least the first string all four fingers just get a sound out of each one if you can get a good sound out of the first one do four times on each of them that's huge okay your eventual goal is to go across all six strings doing four of each and then eventually we'll do two of each and one of each but for today stick to four it's totally fine some people ask can I do upstrokes when I do that I wouldn't recommend it right away you don't want to go like this right away okay because you're not really able to do up strokes as well as you can do down strokes and the down strokes are more important at this key at the stage at this level so in later lessons we definitely will do up strokes the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna jump right into some chord shapes because once you could play a couple chord shapes you feel like you're already playing songs that's a great thing to already feel like you're doing stuff with the guitar so what I want you to do now we have the fingers warmed up a little bit we used all four of them so we should be able to make a few easy chords I say easy but they can be challenging at first what I want you to do right now is to find the third string so remember we start at the skinniest string one two three this string is called G okay so what you need to do is take your index finger and we're gonna place it on the third string but the first fret right here if you want to you could take your pick and just pluck the third string make sure it's making a sound okay sounds good if it sounds like this you're not pressing enough give it just enough pressure all right next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna try something just for fun just to hear some notes playing at the same time that's what a chord is we're gonna play the third string the second string and the first string all at the same time so watch my picking hand here I'm gonna start at the third string and just brush across the strings we're making an E major chord right now this is just a baby version of it even though it does contain all the notes of the full chord but we're gonna double up some of the notes to make it sound really huge okay but it could be a little tricky to get the fingers to follow our orders at first so this one should be good the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take our ring finger our third finger here and we're gonna place it on the 4th string 2nd fret like this so right away that's kind of weird so let's get the other finger in there now just to complete it take your middle finger and place it on the fifth string 2nd fret so you end up with this kind of shape right here it's not really an obvious shape like a straight line or anything like that but you'll just grow to remember that as an e shape now if you can make this shape what I want you to do is I want you to take your pick go to the fattest string on your guitar the 6th string and just sweep all the way across it's not a great sound big sound okay so instead of just doing the little three string version of it we're doing the six string version of the E major chord [Music] now some people have trouble reading it the way we did in that order so if you did have a little trouble do it the opposite way okay so let's take our middle finger this is the same chord by the way and let's go to the fifth string 2nd fret we'll do that first now take your ring finger and tuck it underneath that finger on the 4th string 2nd fret so this is a little bit more stable feeling alright now we can take our 1st finger and place it on the 3rd string 1st fret okay let's strum through it now we have the same cord [Music] sounds great now the reason I choose this chord out of all of them is because all your fingers are in a little section here so you don't have to spread them out at all and do anything strange with them right away and at the very minimum you could still do just the baby chord and be fine so it's a good chord to do the small version of if you want to but I recommend if you're you know comfortable with the guitar at least with the spider exercise feeling you should be able to have the dexterity to play this chord keep working on it until it feels it comfortable same rules apply by the way that they did for the individual notes you want to keep your fingers curved and use your fingertips otherwise if you flatten them out you end up touching the other strings and you get like a muted sound so if you get that make sure you really use your fingertips and then try it again get them out of the way of the open strings all right so now is a good time to just practice a four downstroke strum everything's so basic today I know but it's supposed to be we're gonna build up very soon all right let's take the picking hand and let's strum through all six strings pretend it's one big string we're gonna do this four times ready go [Music] all right so that's the beginning of it there are a couple other strums we're gonna do actually will do one more today just so you have two options the other one is almost as easy except we're gonna actually throw in an upstroke because a lot of people get kind of restless they want to go the other direction so here's what we're gonna do we're gonna do down stroke down stroke and then we're gonna go down and then an up and then it down so think down down down up down and your picking hand will follow ready go down again down the next thing we're gonna do is I want to give you a couple chords to work on just so you can switch back and forth one chord is great to work on in you know if you're really trying to master just one chord stick with E for as long as you need to but if you feel like you have it down I want you to switch to another chord so here's what we're gonna do we're actually going to make a chord that sheep that's very similar to this it's really close by so watch what we do we take our index finger we just lift it off now we take this grouping the middle finger and ring finger and we just move them towards the floor by one string each so we just moved them over now what we do is we take our pinky that's kind of you know left out of the party and we're gonna invite them into the second string second fret so you kind of have to tuck it underneath the ring finger so you have a lot of fingers in one fret isn't that crazy so your middle finger ring finger and pinky are all in the second fret each of them get their own string thank goodness alright so now we need to do is we need to take our pick and go to the fifth string one two three four five and strum across five strings ready go [Music] that's called an a major chord one more time go [Music] the biggest mistake people make as they include the sixth string and it gets a little too heavy sounding so make sure you're starting at the fifth string which by the way is the a string and this is the a chord so it makes sense just like when we played the e string first we play the e chord so it all sort of equals out right all right so realize that the transition to a is pretty simple once you understand how how similar these chords are so let's go back to e by taking our pinkie off moving this grouping of fingers back over to the 5th and 4th strings and then adding our index finger to the 3rd string 1st fret now we're back to the E major go I know some of you might be thinking that thumb's looking pretty wild you know you said to keep it in the back and now you're up here and doing all the stuff with it that's what I mean after a while you know the spider exercise it's very important to keep your thumb in the back but when you start getting in the courts the thumb likes to start to move around and down the road you're actually gonna use it as a fretting mechanism all right so it's gonna be one of the fingers and helping out but as long as it's back here somewhere you're okay so what I want you to do is practice going from E major to a major and switching back and forth between those two now you don't have to instantly switch like you might think right away instead what we're gonna do is we're gonna play a certain amount of strums for the e give you a little bit of time move to the next chord and then do a certain strum so we'll start with the four down strokes because that's the most basic strum you can do let's go to the E major chord and we're gonna play that four times hopefully you guys have it all fretted ready go three four I don't think you have to switch superfast today you could even stop the sound if you want to lift up your index finger move the other two fingers over now they're on the middle two strings add the pinky on the second string second fret and now play the five strings remember the a chord starts on the fifth string four times ready to go now our goal is to move back to the E chord so lift up your pinkie move the grouping over add the end Nick's index finger and let's do that four times go and I'm fully aware how frustrating that is to try to switch that fast at this point so realize that this is supposed to happen over a period of time of practicing this week because lessons are typically once a week private lessons and so they have a whole week to work on this alright because next week we're gonna get into the D chord we're gonna do all sorts of other things but we'll leave it at that as far as how many chords we do today let's go back to E and I want to try that other strum pattern just so you get a different feel so once you have the E chord let's do the down down down up down picking ready go down down let's do it again down down down up down take your time and switch to a if you could go fast that's great I'm not expecting that today alright ready a chord all ready to go go down down down down down some people ask me well how do you not hit the e-string you know the fat string when you do up strokes and you're strumming a lot well later around that thumb that I was talking about is gonna come over the top and touch that string just a little bit to kill it see end up not worrying about it [Laughter] then great all right so let's go with that idea right now switching between E and a and seeing what we can do with it there are a lot of songs that actually include these chords there's a one that was in the movie or the show stranger things should I stay or should I go or you could just go e to a and back to E so that's just one example and even just moving from E to a quickly back and forth eventually just sounds like you're playing a real song [Music] so don't discount the power of one or two cords because I can really go far especially when we start to add three cords then you could play a million songs let's go ahead and do a couple more things because it's already as far as my camera's go 27 minutes and 30 minutes goes by really fast when you're doing a private lesson well let's recap really quick we did all the posture stuff holding the pic all that stuff tuning I tuned for you most likely if you're a private student I would a tune your guitar for you what a recommending getting electric tuner and then we'll tune later on in other lessons and then we did the spider exercise four times each really getting our finger technique down as much as possible if you want to go crazy go through all six strings totally fine then we learned how to create chords basically II the baby version the full version and the a full version by the way this is the full grown-up version this isn't any like kids version at all so you're playing the real deal when you're doing these ones and then we learned how to strum and how to move between those chords and the last thing I want to do because I always want to send you home reminding you how to play these chords nowadays I could just take a quick video and send to a student but what I like them to do is to read a chord chart so what you should be able to do is look at this chart I'll put it on the screen and be able to relate it to the chord that we played earlier E major both of these are major chords by the way e major and a major later we'll do the minor the sad versions of them those are great but for today we're in the major world so if you take a look at the core chart I don't have it in front of me I'm just imagining it right now I'm gonna make the strings obvious they're gonna be vertical up and down and it's weird cuz it's almost like you're looking at the guitar like this like a guitar standing on a guitar stand and so if you check out how the fingers go the fingers are 1 2 3 & 4 the thumb will be a T that's how will signify it alright so now we have the middle finger the second finger on the 5th string 2nd fret so you see how the frets are gonna be horizontal like this so just take your middle finger and go to that 5th string 2nd fret the ring finger is gonna go to the 4th string 2nd fret and even though the fingers on the real guitar are a little bit diagonal on the actual gret the chart it's gonna look very up-and-down like right on top of each other of course that's pretty much impossible to do in real life alright and then what we'll do is we'll take our first finger and go to the 3rd string 1st fret right here everything else has zeros at the top which means you play it open so let's play that chord when you learn the a chord what's gonna happen is you're gonna see an X at the top that just means you don't play that string which I already told you earlier you just avoid the sixth string when you play the a chord but go ahead and create that using the chart and then strum it make sure it sounds good [Music] okay so that's usually what I do for the first lesson and like I said it had a 99 percent retention rate so people always came back because I got excited because they could do those first few things and then from there I taught him a couple more chords some more strums they were playing songs right off the bat and then we do have deeper and deeper into the theory stuff didn't hit him over the head right away with theory because I can scare people off really quick so you know just get people playing guitar right away and if you're new and you're taking these lessons hopefully you could see how quickly you can play the guitar with just a few of the right moves in the beginning okay all right like I said if you enjoyed this lesson check out the art of guitar calm I have a whole library of all the lessons and we're building it constantly I was putting new lessons up every week so I will catch you guys there and hopefully that lesson helped you out we'll catch you later thanks bye

Channel: The-Art-of-Guitar

Views: 4,945,462

Rating: 4.9403133 out of 5

Keywords: the art of guitar, lesson, how to play, lessons, six string, acoustic, electric, learn, learning, amps, method, tutorial, the most effective, intro guitar lesson, introductory, introduction, first lesson, new, beginner, basic chords, strum, warmup, strums, chord chart

Id: w4a2ge9N31E

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 07 2019