Guitar Basics: Strumming an Electric Guitar Strumming means dragging a pick (or the fingers) across the strings of the guitar. You drag the guitar pick in a downward motion (toward the floor) to sound the chords formed by the left hand, but you don't try to do anything except sound the chords. In doing even that, however, you create rhythm. If you "pick-drag" in regular, even strokes, one per beat, adhering to a tempo (musical rate), you're strumming the guitar in rhythm. And that's music, whether you mean it to be or not. More specifically, you're strumming a quarter-note rhythm, which is fine for songs such as the Beatles' "Let It Be," and other ballads. For the record, strumming an E chord in quarter notes looks like the notation in Figure 1. Note that rhythm slashes are used to show that you should play the entire chord, as opposed to note heads (which indicate only a single pitch). Figure 1: Playing an E chord in one bar of fo...
What are the basic types of electric guitar and bass pickups? There have been thousands of pickup models since magnetic pickup technology first appeared in the 1920s and ’30s. The sheer number of possibilities can be daunting. But a good starting point is to group pickups by “family.” Here are some common ways of classifying pickups: All these terms apply to both electric guitar and bass pickups. There’s some overlap between these terms, and some pickups that fall between categories. But once you grasp these basic distinctions, you’ll be well on your way to mastering the language of pickups. Back to Top ^ What about acoustic pickups? Acoustic pickups range from simple soundhole pickups to more elaborate systems that combine multiple technologies. Magnetic acoustic pickups, such as our Woody soundhole pickup , work much like electric guitar pickups and is incredibly easy to install. Meanwhile, “piezoelectric” (or just “piezo”) pickups use crystals or a strip of film to sense vi...
Barre Chord Numbering Putting it All Together Click here to download a PDF file of Intro to Barre Chord Theory. For people applying chord theory and chord numbering on the piano/keyboard, it is easy to visualize how the chords work together. For the guitarist, it is not that simple. Many musicians have moved to the Nashville Number System for chording songs, and instead of writing the progression G, C, D, C, they might write 1, 4, 5, 4 with the thought that they may transpose from one key to any key. This is one of the benefit of understanding chord theory: making transposing easier. Barre chords enable the guitarist to visualize and transpose with ease. If we are in the key of F, we can play all our major and minor chords with these barre chords (remember I, IV and V are major; ii, iii, and vi are minor): Some important things to observe here include: The I, ii, and iii chords are all whole steps apart. We use the E shape barre chord for them, changing to the Em ...
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