The Best Songs to Learn on Acoustic Guitar For Beginners

Progressive LearningLearning to play the acoustic guitar can be fun and rewarding, but at first you might feel a bit overwhelmed trying to find songs that you can easily play with little or no experience. Don’t give up because there are guitar songs… even ones that you know and love that are written with the beginner in mind.

One of the first things you learn as a beginner on the guitar are chords and chord progressions. As you learn these progressions you will want to find easy songs that you can play that incorporate these chords.

Good easy songs written for the guitar have a few things in common:

  1. They are written with relatively few chord changes.
  2. The chord changes require a small amount finger movement.
  3. Chord changes happen evenly throughout the song.
  4. The chord fingerings are not complex.

With these criteria in mind, I have come up with a few of the easiest songs to play on the guitar. Some of these songs you may not have heard of. Others will be a little more familiar:

  • No Particular Place To Go, Chuck Barry – This song written in the 1960′s is a moderate shuffle with a chord progression of B – E – A – B7.
  • I Shot the Sheriff, Bob Marley – Written in 1974, this is an easy Caribbean beat and has a chord progression of Am – Dm – Fmaj7 – Em. Read the rest of this entry »
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Learn Guitar Online – More Killer Blues Chord Progressions

Progressive LearningEver since our first ancestors discovered how to make music the human intellect has been constantly searching for more complex harmonies; go back as far as you can in history and trace the evolution of music and you will discover one common fact; the constant search by musicians to create more complex harmonies to support the ‘new’ music of their time.

The blues is no exception, most guitar players know how to play a few blues licks and strum the common 12 bar blues progressions in a variety of ‘guitar friendly’ keys; the advancing guitarist soon tires of the basic chords and begins their search for different and fresh new ways to play the standard 12 blues progressions behind the soloist.

The following blues progression is in the key of C.

Here is a typical 12 bar blues in C major.

Progression #1

C /// | C /// | C /// | C /// |

F /// | F /// | C /// | C /// |

G7 ///| G7/// | C /// | G7/// || C (last time)

In this next example I’m using a few harmonic surprises however if you refer back to progression #1 you will discover we are keeping the original harmonic skeleton intact, it’s just how we are introducing the chords to the listener. Read the rest of this entry »

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Learn Guitar Online – Incredible Blues Chord Progressions

Progressive LearningMost guitar players have participated in jam sessions or at least heard about them; these informal meetings are where reputations are made (and lost). Invariably someone will want to play the blues at these sessions, in fact knowing how to play interesting variations of the standard 12 bar blues is a great way to build a reputation if you are a guitarist.

Early on in my career I became fascinated with rhythm guitar playing, not just strumming a few chords in the open position of the guitar, rather the delicate art of added interesting chord textures and how the guitarist could work as one with the rest of the rhythm section.

Studying the art rhythm guitar playing and chord substitution turned out to be a terrific way for me to play with good musicians, as obvious as this sounds all good players need someone to accompany them so the better I became at playing rhythm the more in demand I became, it’s a good trick and one that always works; develop your rhythm guitar skills and you will always be working.

Since it’s impossible to escape (or survive) playing at a jam session without knowing how to play the blues we might as well learn how to play interesting variations of the blues and use these jam sessions as ‘on-the-job-training’ sessions.

Here are three variations of the 12 bar blues for you to try at your next jam session, all progressions shown in the key of ‘C’. Read the rest of this entry »

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