Beginner Acoustic Lesson 1 - Your Very First Guitar Lesson (E Minor Asus2)

Hey! What's up you guys? Marty Schwartz here and this is going to be considered your very first guitar lesson.

So this is what I have I've taught guitar for a very long time, even before the Internet, I know the dark ages. I was even teaching back then and I figured out a way that I wish a teacher would have taught me my first lesson, and so for my own desires now I'm going to be passing that on to you, and what we want to do is just start with one little shape "scouts honor", one little shape that we can move around and start making some music right away. Now if your guitar is not in tune, it's not going to matter how good you are at the fingering and all that the guitars not in tune is not going to sound good and you're going to get discouraged.

So I do have a video on just the basics of tuning your guitar, there's a link for it here so you can check check that out because we need the guitar in tune before we kind of do this stuff. So we're going to zoom in and talk about the guitar a little bit and learn this little shape with our fingers and you know the real key is not natural music ability really, it's the the desire and in the beginning which I like to call like the first hump of guitar. Maybe we could call it like two months, what you want to do is if you've always wanted to play guitar just give yourself you know, work on it for like five minutes a day for two months and don't decide that it's too hard or too you know not for you.

Just give it that two months of five minutes a day and what you'll find is a lot of times at five minutes when you have a little breakthrough can become an hour or twenty minutes, but you know if you just give yourself the five minutes a day for two months you can take a few days off here and there that's okay and then decide because really it's about breaking through that first hump because the stuff you learn after the basics you can just add little things to your arsenal and it's just fun. So, anyway really appreciate the support let's zoom in though and start learning this stuff here we go! All right, so I'm going to show you these two chords that are the nice kind of the easiest chords to start with, and you can make a little music right away but real quick let me talk about just the basics of the guitar a little bit.

We've got a guitar, step 1, step 2? We've got the neck of the guitar and the body of the guitar. Body, neck, the headstock of the guitar this is a Taylor 614 got my tuner here, these are the tuners, headstock then we've got the strings, right the strings are connected to the bridge of the guitar.

You've got sides here and you've got the top, you got the back, you got a little strap, strap a bolt here and a strap a little strap bolt there you can see the reflection of my light and other guitars and stuff. Secret, secret studio stuff and then but importantly when we start learning we've got the strings and if you look at the how to tune guitar you know Eddie ate dynamite good bye Eddie, and you've got the sound hole and the really important the starting point here this little piece of plastic or ivory or whatever it ends up being that's called "the nut" of the guitar, and then these metal lines here these metal brackets are the frets and what on guitar when you say like for instance the first fret of the e-string you don't mean right on the metal, if I said "first fret" I mean this little section here in between these two things is the first fret. So this whole space right here is the first fret, this area in between these two metal frets, this is the second fret, third fret fourth fret, etc.

The dots on the guitar are just little locator points so eventually you start to memorize where the notes are or help you you know play where a certain chord fits in. They're visual references and then what you also have is you a spot here on guitar where it's the 12th fret and you get these double dots right there, you see the you got single dots here, you get to the double dots right there and that's that's the octave of the open string. So if this is an open E string, it would actually go through the musical alphabet e f g a b c d e again so the open strings start over and what's called an octave up on the twelfth fret.

Okay so that's just a basics for the guitar let's learn the E minor chord now I recommend you get a pick, and if you're a beginner I would recommend a light pick or an extra light pick if you've never played guitar before. As I progressed on guitar I switched to a thicker pick as I went along okay so, we got a pick, we got the strings, we got the frets we got the you know the guitar is in tune. So we're going to play what's called E minor and it's like the first chord of "Wonderwall" by Oasis.

It's the first chord of "About A Girl" by Nirvana, it's a first chord of "Wish You Were Here" by Pink Floyd. The list goes on and on I believe "Don't Cry" by Guns N'Roses "Civil War" by Guns and Roses plus it's in those songs not as the first chord for it's in a million songs. So we're going to take our pointy finger our index finger and if you've never played before you're a beginner it does take a little time to build some calluses up, so if it gets to the point where it's painful then take a break.

There's there's no rush although everyone wants to play right away and I get that instant gratification but, we just gotta like just get used to it just like anything. You know, when you write with a pencil you get a little callus, got to get that first, so we're going to take our pointer finger here and we're going to play the second fret of the a-string. So with my pointer finger and you know my hands just kind of behind the neck here like this and my pointy finger is going to hit the second fret, so that area is the first fret, this area is the second fret and we're on the a-string so the tip of my finger straight down, not the flat part the tip of it, straight down and then my middle finger, the tip of that straight down on the second fret of the d-string.

So a little pro tip for you when if I say second fret and you're kind of scooted back almost to where it's on the first fret? That's not ideal ideal is closer to the next fret up you don't have to press as hard and you don't get a buzzy sound. So if I scoot it back, we don't want that if I start to scoot it up?

You can hear it rings out perfectly, so then we need to get our middle finger on that same fret the second fret but on the D string right there and we put them both down. Now if your hands kind of touching the other strings we're not going to get the perfect sounding chord. So we want to make sure that there's enough space in our hand to where the strings that our fingers aren't down on will still ring out and it should sound like that.

And so just to start with you know you got your pick and I'm holding the pick um, kind of if my thumb was up like that, then the pick is pointing outward it's not directly sideways, it's not directly pointed up, it's just a little bit tilted like that and then I pinch it with my pointy finger and I paint, I paint on the strings around the sound hole area. You know and your arms should be nice and fluid, I've got the curvature of the guitar which most acoustics will have that is on my right thigh for comfort, it's comfy, okay? So let's go back to that chord.

and to start with we just want to make sure that the chords ringing out correctly, the guitars in tune and for bonus points, for extra credit for you great grubbers out there. I got that from school rock um you can pick out individual strings and make sure that they're ringing out per you know properly. This is also the cord from "Nothing Else Matters" by Metallica you can do some "up-downs", and as we progress learning new chords, a great practice to remember it right I take my hand off, I look on it again and make sure I can still form it.

Take your time, stick your tongue out of the side of your mouth if it helps you concentrate, Michael Jordan style. But another tip from the muscle memory of these shapes that we're going to have to memorize, is that you hold the shape of the chord and you take your hand off while you keep the shape and then we go back and we put it down again. and that's how we start to remember that as well.

Keep the shape, take the hand off, put it back on. So that's our first chord and we could start going you know we can do downs, we could do "down-up-down-up. " We can take it nice and easy, now here's what's cool and this is why I picked the second chord I'm going to teach you which is called "A suspended two" it's got a fancy name, but the reason I wanted to show to you right away after E minor is that we don't have to learn anything new.

Nothing! All we do is we take that exact shape and we scoot it down a string so the e minor was the second fret on the a string and the second fret on the D string and we strung the whole thing. To play an A sus two, it's the exact same shape, we just scoot it down so now it's the second fret of the D string as an Eddie ate dynamite and the second fret of the g string, Eddie ate dynamite good bye sorry Eddie ate dynamite good bye Eddie.

So the D and the G 2nd fret index middle finger you can strum the whole guitar and it sounds like this. Now if you can avoid this top string here and start from here? Then that's even better so that's the A sus two, and here's the E minor.

So then the next thing that we want to practice is just a real real simple strumming with our right hand we'll just go 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, and then switch to 3 pull mom three four and back. Then you get a little cocky about it, you can start just practicing them back and forth like. oh now I'm also hearing the "Take Me To Church" song is that a minor chord as well, so it's a million songs actually but so we have two chords right now and you can start getting creative and playing music and making some sound.

want to make some sound so we've got E minor, scoot the thing over a string or down a string and you have A sus 2. Which also kind of sounds like a tenacious D chord. and that's your start!

All right, there it was, thanks for hanging out real quick there's a link that you'll find for tuning your guitar and then if you had a little bit of fun with this lesson there's a link for the next lessons in this super beginner series. So check those out and thanks for the support and you know just remember just be patient five minutes a day, two months and make some music. I also find it's very therapeutic and and it's just can be a great meditative thing to do besides, you know digging music, so thanks again for the support and we'll see in the next video!