Lesson 2

You will learn

How to warm up before playing
To play in regular four-strumming (four measure) pattern - Sweet Home Alabama
Four new chords - E, E7, A and A7

Recommended time for completion: 1-2 weeks

Tune your guitar

I do encourage you to tune your guitar before you continue - otherwise it will sound horrible, and people will not want to listen to your beautiful music...

Tune your guitar by comparing notes with your computers MIDI-bank: click here!

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Warming up before you play

Warming up before might sound a little stupid, since we are "just going to play guitar", right? We're not going to run a marathon or anything...

However it is actually very good, and you will notice a big difference whether you warm up or not as to how your guitar performance is affected! The warm up helps:

1. To get some blood flowing to your virtuosic guitar fingers
2. To get your muscles a little warmer and happier to to some musical work
3. To basically become more mobile.
4. To prevent musculous or tendinous strain.

Now there are many diferent ways in which you can do this, however I like to keep is simple. I usually just:

1. Do the hand-shakes
2. Do the ball
3. Do the stretch

Also some massage on your palm surface of the hand, as well as the underside of your forearm is helpful, with focus on your fretting hand of course (there are the muscle groups that will be involved mostly)

I will demonstrate this to you in the video.

Also I'd like to add that exaggeration of these movements (quite obvoisly) might hurt your arm, and it might even lead to slapping someone nearby in the face. So watch out ;)

Play in simple four stroke measure- Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama

Time to make use of the chords of the previous lesson! We are going to play a song in which these specific hords are actually used - Sweet Home Alabama. I'm sure that you have all heard about it, however if you did not:

I have composed a simple bassline completed with the main "solo" riff from the song (that we all know so well), in guitarpro (guitar tabulature software) that we are going to have as a backing track for playing the chords.

Now when I'm talking about about playing in four-stroke measure I mean that we are going to strum the guitar 4 times each measure. But what is then a measure? Well - have a look at the picture:

This is a regular musical notation in four measure. The funny figures are fourth pauses; four within each measure. I am merely using them to illustrate the actual strokes in the measure. imagine that you count "One-two-three-four" in every measure.

If you strum the guitar each time you count, you will be doing it right=).

Just in case I am a little unclear - I will show you in the video how to do.

Notice that I only play downstrokes in the video. In this case I believe it is what makes the best sound for playing in this particular way, and I suggest you learn the same way for this particular way of playing the song. In the next lesson I will show you a little more advanced and better-sounding wayu to play the song, which will utilize both up and downstrokes.

D C G D C G and so on.

e---2--2---0--0--|--3--3--3--3---------
B---3--3---1--1--|--3--3--3--3---------
G---2--2---0--0--|--0--0--0--0----o----
D---0--0---2--2--|--0--0--0--0----o----
A----------3--3--|--2--2--2--2---------
E----------------|--3--3--3--3---------

| = measure divider
o= repeat everything
o

Tired of practicing with me yapping in the background?

MIDI-filer
Slow | Normal | Fast

download guitarpro tab

You may already at this early stage try to sing along with your music. This, however, is an art that takes quite some time to master. I could not do this properly until 1-2 years of playing, but if you give it a good go it should not be any problem for you (your simultaneous capacity surely exceeds mine;)). If you hear me singing in the video, be aware of that I am not a pro singer, and that it may sound awful.

Here's the chorus for the song. You can actually almost play the entire song with this chord pattern, but it changes a little here and there, but I'm not going to go through that at this point.

Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you

source: LetsSingIt

New chords

New lesson - new chords. In the next lesson we will have a chord repitition, so make you you learn how to grip 'em and strum 'em neatly!

A
x02220

A7
x02020

(you can adapt different ways of fretting this chord)

E
022100

E7
020100

I demonstrate the chords in the video

Allright

That's all for this lesson, before you move on to the next...

THUMB! Checkit, if it's in the wrong position - correct it (it's very difficult to unlearn the "baseball habit")
make sure you can play all chords neatly
Practise a little move on your speed in chord changing - should be getting a little faster now.
Keep in mind NOT to stress - you have all the time in the world to play guitar,and to learn it fast and sloppily is just a waste of time.
Give http://www.chordie.com/ a visit and search for your favourite song, and try to play it a little. This is a great way to learn.