>> The parts of the guitar and the posture of
your body and your hands when you play it are going to stay basically the same,
no matter what type of guitar you have.
Let's take a look at these things on my guitar.
You have to think of the parts of the guitar like you're thinking of a person.
This part up here is the head or the headstock,
the neck, and the body of the instrument.
Going back up to the top,
you have your tuners, you're tuning pegs.
They'll look a little bit different depending on what type of guitar you have,
but they're all basically the same.
On the neck of the guitar you have the fretboard, which is on the top.
Each one of these bars is called a fret bar,
and the actual square in between the fret bars is called the fret.
We start numbering them down here.
This is 1,
the numbers ascending of your frets as you go towards the body.
People consider this the upper bout.
Especially on an acoustic guitar,
you'll see that it comes in a little bit here at
the waist of the instrument and then the lower bout.
This is your bridge, this whole section,
and this little part where the strings go over the bridge
to tie or to put into it with balls on the end,
this is called the saddle.
If you have an acoustic guitar or classical guitar,
you have a beautiful pattern here called the rosette,
and then you have the sound hole.
This area here is referred to as your soundboard.
This is where most of the vibration comes that gives you the sound that you want.
In terms of your strings,
they are numbered in a bit of a different way than you might expect.
The one that's closest to your face is called six.
This is 6, 5,
The same is true when you look at a different type of guitar.
If you look over here to my right,
parts of the electric guitar are basically the
same as the parts on an acoustic or classical guitar.
You have the head, the neck,
going up into the body.
You have the upper bout,
which on these types of electric guitars is called the horn,
because of the way it looks.
The waist of the instrument, the lower bout.
On an electric guitar,
you don't have a sound hole or a soundboard in the same way.
You have these things in there called pickups.
They're a little bit different on different types of electric guitars,
but they have the same function as the sound hole and the soundboard.
Your volume knob is self-explanatory.
It makes it louder or softer.
You have to tone knobs that affect the quality of your sound.
Some electric guitars have the switch,
and it's called the pickup switch.
It will decide how many of these pickups are working.
You can turn them on and off,
and that also affects your tone.
Also similar moving up to the top here,
these are your tuning pegs.
Because they're all on the same side of
the neck and the head on this type of electric guitar,
you have to really look and make sure you see that this is
the sixth string tuning peg and this is the first string tuning peg.
You have the fretboard,
just as you do on an acoustic guitar,
with your fret starting at one going up, your fret bars.
You have these dots that help you keep track of where you are.
The reason you have dots on an electric guitar is because
the body meets the neck at a much higher fret than it does on a guitar like I'm playing.
You really need those dots to keep track of where you are. Those are your parts.
When you hold the guitar,
what you really want is you need your body to
be relaxed and your shoulders to be pretty much level.
When you have a guitar like I do,
a classical guitar,
or this electric nylon string guitar that's made with classical guitars in mind,
our frets only go up to 12 if you count them one by one until you get to the body.
It's a short neck guitar,
so that's why I have it on my left leg.
It helps my hand move up and
down the neck of the guitar without running into my body because the neck is short.
If you have a different type of acoustic guitar or
if you're playing electric guitar and the neck is longer at the body,
then what you're going to do is switch legs.
I'm going to do that here.
I'm going to put my guitar on the right leg.
You'll see here that I still have this upper bout right in the center of me,
so my shoulders can stay level when I play.
It doesn't matter what leg the guitar is on,
if you use a strap or if you stand up with your electric guitar, same thing.
You want this part or the horn
here of the upper bout of the electric guitar to be right in your center.
You'll notice that as I'm moving,
I'm shifting over something underneath my feet.
That's called a footstool.
It raises the leg the guitar sits
on so that the whole guitar can come up to your shoulders a little bit,
and then you don't have to worry about hunching your back over.
That's really important. You want the guitar to feel solid on your lap
so that you can feel like you're bringing your arms to it instead of hunching down,
or feeling like you have to really reach for it.
You want it to come to you.
The angle that you put the neck at,
whether it's like this or if it's more straight,
the way Johnny Cash used to play,
you do it based on how your hands can come to the neck and play it in a relaxed way.
This is something you're going to be working on and modify.
I've probably changed the way I've held that the guitar many
times over the years that I've played and you will too,
but that's the basic rule.
At that point you want to think about
how your fretting hand is going to go on the instrument.
I'm saying fretting hand instead of left hand
because some of you might be left-handed players,
you might be playing the other way, so to speak.
Whatever hand is going to play notes on the fretboard of the instrument,
we're going to take a look at that right now.
The way I think of it is, you make the letter C with your hand and your thumb.
Then you're going to reach around,
very gently place your thumb on the back of the guitar neck,
so that your fingers can curl over the strings.
You think about it like,
"I'm going to put each finger in a different fret and just curl them over,
so I'm going to push down on my fingertips when I play."
You'll notice that my little finger leans a little bit towards the body,
my index finger leans a little bit towards the head and
that puts everything in a really comfortable position right here.
My thumb is just touching for balance,
and my wrist is slightly curved out,
just a little bit like this.
If you curve in like this when you play,
you'll put a lot of pressure here and that can lead to some injuries.
What you want is it to curve this way, and not concave.
You'll see old pictures of Jimi Hendrix putting his thumb over,
you can put your thumb over sometimes.
You'll notice he didn't always do that,
and he also had giant hands.
For those of us don't have as large of hands,
we're going to rotate that thumb over.
Just let it be there for balance.
This is going to be a really good comfortable position for your hand on the strings.
For your picking hand,
some of us use our fingers to play the guitar, I do.
I use them almost exclusively now.
But you can also use a pick.
If you haven't made a choice yet,
whether you're going to play finger style with
your fingers or even if you've tried to play finger style a little bit,
I'm going to suggest that in the beginning that you
use a pick because it's a great skill to have
and there is a lot of complicated nuance that goes into picking with your fingers.
Right now we're going to take a look at the pick.
Again, what you're going to do is you're going to
make the letter C with your picking hand.
You see how my thumb falls right here on the crease of my index finger?
I'm going to lift that up and put the pick so that the pointy part is sticking out,
and I'm just going to let the weight of my thumb hold the pick down.
Now I can very loosely hold the pick,
it's not going anywhere.
If you look at it, it's just loose and it's just hanging down.
You can see that I have a very loose fist,
everything is really relaxed here,
I'm not grabbing, and it's the weight of my thumb that's
holding the pick onto the crease of my index finger.
Then I'm going to let my elbow go right to the upper bout,
maybe a little behind the guitar,
just depending on how big your guitar is.
This is the motion I'm going to use when I play with the pick.
It's back and forth like this on a diagonal.
You'll see in a minute when I play that you just play
straight down on a diagonal and then back up. Nice and gentle.
If you do that, the pick will not get stuck. Here we go.
That's the basic.
Again, you can shift it around.
You can decide where you want the pointy part to be,
how much pointy part you want sticking out with the pick.
If it's too much,
it'll feel like it's going to fall out of your hand.
If it's too far in,
it'll feel like you're going to scrape your finger when you play.
You want just enough out,
it's usually about that much. That's how you hold it.
As silly as it sounds,
I will suggest sitting with your guitar,
picking the leg you want to sit on.
Only put it on your left leg if you have 12 frets between the head and the body,
otherwise put it on your right leg.
Just get comfortable putting your hand on the strings.
Without even playing a note,
just put your hand on the strings.
Every time you move your hand,
you move your thumb as well,
so the whole thing moves.
Take a look at your pick, get it in there so you can move
your hand around really relaxed and it doesn't fall out.
That will get you all set up to start the first exercise.