

You are ready to play a song!įortunately, this is actually the easy part. For our purposes, you probably don’t need to worry about it (if we wanted to, we wouldn’t google “how to play guitar without learning guitar”, right?), but if your chords sound a bit…out, try to avoid the top string and see if that improves things. Keith Richards literally takes the string off his guitars completely, so he doesn’t have to worry about it. Some players will “mute” that string by touching it with the tip of their finger while pressing the other 5 strings, or by wrapping their thumb over the top to mute it. The reason for this digs into music theory, so we won’t go into that. Remark: A complication here is that when playing major chords in Open G, you are not supposed to play the top string, the string closest to you. By keeping your finger on the strings and sliding between frets, you can strum any of the major chords (including flats and sharps, which fall between these chords – the 3rd fret could be an A Sharp Major, for example or B flat major, but since we avoid any hint of actually learning music theory, that falls into the category of “things you’ll want to learn someday in the future”). The “shape” of the chord is simply your finger in a straight line, and it’s what’s known as “movable” because you simply move it from fret to fret to change the chord you’re playing. That’s all major chords, and for easy sing-along, that’s all you need. Moving your finger to the fourth fret produces a B major chord. Once you’re able to strum all the strings without any “muted” or dead-sounding strings, congratulations! You just plucked an A major chord. Bracing your hand with your thumb on the back of the neck can help. This may take some practice those strings are harder to play than you think. Check out your tuning app and have it read “D”. Start spinning the one connected to the nearest string while also plucking it with your fingers.

Look up at the top of the guitar – there are six ‘pins’, each connected to one of the strings. If you haven’t played your guitar in ten years, you might end up with something completely different, or the string will snap and you’ll rush to the emergency room. If you start your tuning app and pick at it with your finger, you’ll probably get something close to “E”. If you look at the neck, you have six strings.
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If you’re not sure how to tune your guitar, it’s not that hard: lay the guitar on your lap as if you were going to play it. There are many benefits to Open G tuning, as we will see. This is an unusual but not entirely unusual way of tuning your guitar – Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones famously made this tuning and wrote many of the band’s most famous hits. All you need to know about this is that when we’re done, if you strum your guitar without touching the strings with your other hand, you get a G major chord. What we are going to do is tune your guitar to what is known as Open G tuning.
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If you are one of the millions of people who have been given a guitar in one way or another in their lives…a guitar they dutifully moved from one place to another with the sincere intention of one day learning to play –you probably know it’s not as easy as rock stars make it seem. Photo: Svetlana Romantsova (Shutterstock)
