"Major" fun

Playing around with the major chords and strumming patterns is a great way to find songs that you didn't even know you knew! For example, I learned Hotel Yorba by the White Stripes and was playing it for weeks before I finally figured out where I heard it before. Here's the tab, very simple and uses only G, C, and D.

Sublime

Suuuuuuublime is one of my favorite bands of all time. Therefore, I had to learn some finger picking from Bradley Nowell. So what solo would be better to start with than the one from What I Got? Here's a video that I found which helped me to learn the solo, and also shows a much simpler version of the riff using just the G and D chord. Plus, the dude kind of looks like Batista from Dexter. haha

The Sixth Sense, I mean Chord

This next song I worked on had a mixture of both focuses: chords and finger picking. If you've ever heard Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes, it's a fun and bouncy song to play and it only introduces one chord that isn't a major. The Em (or E minor) chord is reeally easy to play, since it's just the E Major chord but with the third string from the bottom (the G string, ha) played open. With this song, I finally was able to play a sixth chord, and successfully learned my first whole song. Here's the Em chord layout, followed by the tab!

RHCP

Red Hot Chili Peppers is the shit! Therefore, I wanted to start my finger picking practice with something a little more creative than Korn and 3 Doors Down. Here's a tab of the Chili Pepper's intro to Otherside and Give It Away. If someone's just starting guitar, these will be fun things to play while learning to stretch out that pinky finger! PS, the "s" between notes means slide for those of you just starting out.

Superhero

When I started reading the Guitar for Dummies book and getting used to the major chords, I wanted to add a twist to my learning technique. I decided that while I learn strumming and chords, I want to also learn songs with finger picking so that I'm covering two aspects of guitar playing. So every day that I practiced C, A, G, E, and D, I also was learning small parts of songs like Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down. Aqui es el parte:

Reeewind

Okay, so I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t start at the waaaay beginning. The first thing I ever learned was how to play a tab by Korn’s Falling Away from Me. I’ve must have been 10 or 11 years old, since my oldest brother taught it to me when he started to learn. It goes like this, very simple, and a good way to work on tabbing:

First Post

Okay, so here goes my first post. Since I'm already semi into the guitar-learning experience, I'm gonna have to catch up my blog by listing chronologically what I learned and how. Luckily, it was recent enough that I can remember... But anywho, basically it all started with the purchase of my first guitar. I bought a red fender statocaster with my brother who has already been teaching himself guitar since high school. Next, I bought "Guitar for Dummies" so I had something to go by besides just the internet- yeah, yeah, "ha ha", but the Dummies series aren't bad. Besides guitar handling and those tedious basics, I learned the major way of playing songs... that's right, the major chords! For document purposes, I'm gonna put separate posts in the order that I learned them, so in the rare case that someone decides to follow my footsteps, all the tabs and chords will be in order of difficulty. Well, in my opinion at least. And for the sake of full disclosure, here are the 5 major chords, in order of difficulty!