In this lesson, you will learn how to tune your guitar and start playing. This lesson will also include several practice exercises to start doing on your own in order to improve your guitar playing. We will start by learning the string names and numbers on the guitar Then we will move to the very important task of tuning the strings. Finally, we will begin to play our guitars by practicing strumming and picking.

In this module, we will introduce some of the fundamental concepts of music theory. While you don’t need to be an expert in music theory to play guitar, these essential building blocks will allow you to learn the music you want to play at a faster rate, and music notation will no longer be shrouded in mystery or complexity. You will start with learning about the note wheel and how it is used in the guitar. Then you will identify notes on the fretboard, which will be helpful for picking out melodies. Finally, you will learn basic music notation and rhythms.

In this lesson, you will dig into scales. Don’t be intimidated. You may have heard of, or even practiced, scales. It might have been during piano lessons. Maybe it wasn’t very exciting for you. Hopefully, you’ll find that this time, the approach to scales is much easier and even fun.

In this lesson, you will use all of the skills you’ve gained from the previous lessons to build the foundation of harmony. You will play certain scale notes at the same time to create chords. You will look at why chords sound like they do, how to build them, how to easily play chords in open position, and how to play chords that you can move all around the neck.

Now that you have the “science” of the guitar in your fingers, you will learn a couple of songs. You will do this by using melody (from the scales) and harmony (from the chords) we have learned. You will also learn an essential scale for playing melodies and soloing.