hello everyone and welcome to PMT College powered by professional music
technology and I'm Steve from progress Music Academy today we're going to be
looking at the basic parts of the guitar so I have an electric guitar today and
but if you've got an acoustic don't worry the parts of pretty much the same
so the main chunk of wood this end is called the body of the guitar then we
have the neck of the guitar and then on top of the neck the head or headstock
okay so that's body neck and headstock on the headstock I've got tuners or some
people may call those machine heads okay and what they do is tighten or loosen
the strings so you can get it to the correct pitch and then we have the nut
of the guitar which is kind of hard to see but it's this little slot here which
helps keeps the strings in place basically so they're not moving around
so then moving back down this end we've got the fret board
okay so the front part of the neck this part here is called the fret board some
people or books may call that the fingerboard
okay so we'll stick to fret board today and that's because these little wires
here going this way accord fret wire moving back down this end we've got the
bridge of the guitar your bridge on your guitar may look a little different to
this one it doesn't matter they all serve the same purpose so basically the
strings are fastened into the guitar this end via the bridge and then I've
got the pickups which are these things here and the reason why they're called
pickups without getting scientific at this stage is because they pick up the
sound of the strings which is basically then sent down your cable and into your
amplifier to make it louder okay then you may have various volume
and tone controls again every guitar is different but this particular one has a
volume and a tone so louder or quieter the tone can make it brighter or darker
in tone and then I have a pickup selector switch which allows me to
choose which pickup I want to use no rules on that just whichever one you
like this sound of okay so if you've got an acoustic guitar
the only difference is really you won't have the pickups or any of the controls
you'll have a hollow body and a sound hole because the sound is projected
naturally through the body of the guitar so body neck headstock machine head's we
have the nuts fretboard bridge of the guitar pickups volume and tone controls
so now I'm moving on to the strings so a standard guitar will have six strings
there are variations but again a beginner level we're not going to worry
about that so six string guitar now how the strings are laid out and a lot of
people get these kind of mixed up is we have a top and a bottom string now
conveniently enough the the top string is at the bottom okay because on a
guitar it's nothing to do with where he actually is it's how it sounds so the
reason why this is called the top string is because it's the highest in pitch
okay so a top string and bottom string each of those strings has a name okay
and it's a letter of the alphabet so we have from the bottom from the lowest
string we have the e then it's an a D G B and another E okay
so I'm going to do now is just pluck each of those strings so you've got a
reference on how each one should sound so starting with the low E
and the next one is the a
and then moving on to the D
and then gee
and then we have the B string
and then the top or high e-string
okay now we're going to look at the frets on the guitar and the hand
placement and finger positioning so the frets basically start down this ends
we've got fret 1 here now I'm placing my finger sort of behind the first fret
wire okay fret 2 would be behind the second fret
wire or basically in the second space if you like depending how you want to look
at it fret 3 4 5 6 7 etc some guitars have
fret markers we don't really have any musical reference they're just kind of
so you don't have to count numbers all the time so you can kind of learn over
over sometime that you know the first marker is 3 on this star guitar some
guitars will have a first fret marker but yeah I know on this guitar it's 3 5
7 9 and then 12 with the two dots the two dots by the way marks the octave of
the guitar kind of where the fret board starts again after this point but don't
worry too much about that now so these are the frets on the guitar and I'm just
going to pick a random note okay to fret and show you how to do it so I'm just
going to go for the low E string ok on the 2nd fret and at this point it
doesn't matter which finger we're gonna use so I'm just gonna use my first
finger and if I want to make a nice clear note on that second fret what I'm
gonna do is make sure the finger is just behind that second fret which is the for
our ones play not at the back because you tend to get a little bit of a
muffled sound or a buzzing so closer to the front of the fret always sounds best
so ok if I move it towards the back it starts to buzz a little bit and not
sound too clear so towards the front always sounds best ok
then another thing to think about is which part of the finger you're actually
going to use so it actually depends sometimes on what you're playing but
we're going to go for the finger tips okay so not really the pad of the finger
just the tip okay that's where you're gonna start to get hard skin and
calluses but don't worry that's completely normal and it'll actually
make your fingers a little bit stronger over time so the fingertip is pushing
down the note so my finger from this angle isn't flat it's actually reaching
over the other strings so they're cleared and I can produce that note nice
and clear without obstructing any of the strings that I may need to play so
finally before we actually get into any kind of playing something that gets
overlooked quite a lot is how to sit with the guitar because you're going to
spend most of the time practicing sitting down it's important to remember
no matter how old you are or young you are to have good posture the thing you
want to avoid doing is leaning over the guitar like so you want to keep your
back nice and straight guitar nice and close just so you can
see the strings well and your backs not getting into any kind of difficulty or
pain another thing to consider is a couple of different ways you could sit
with it and the more classical method which would go between your legs or just
aren't near enough to the side of your body which I usually prefer because it's
a little bit more similar to standing it with a guitar strap on so it's not as
much of a difficult transition when you start doing your first gigs so that's
just a couple of things to bear in mind when sitting with a guitar okay so that
was a basic introduction to the guitar and a few beginner techniques you need
to gets tied please check out our next video which is the essential chords that
every guitar player will need
thanks for watching and I do hope you found these videos useful and please
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