Learning to play guitar: chords, scales, and solos by colin mcallister
Learning to Play Guitar: Chords, Scales, and Solos
with Colin McAllister
The Great Courses, 2017
Brilliantly designed so you can learn from the ground up, Learning to Play Guitar: Chords, Scales, and Solos is a unique and effective way to rapidly access one of the most meaningful, enjoyable, and satisfying forms of self expression. You don’t need to know how to read a note when you start this course, but even if you do, you’ll quickly gain new techniques, knowledge, and understanding.
The highly original modular format of this course is designed to immediately get you from learning to playing. Each of the 24-lectures begins with an engaging historical narrative, or personal story, and then dives right in with five modular units of instruction:
-Technique: Learn the correct way to hold the guitar, how to move naturally around the instrument, and all of the core skills of guitar playing, from left hand fingering and shifting to right hand strumming, finger picking, and pick playing.
-Musicianship and Note Reading: Learn how to read three kinds of musical notation, and discover that reading music is actually quite simple if you learn it in short, easy steps; grasp how to play and read rhythms, and develop the ability to play by ear.
-Chords: Discover how to play a wide range of basic chords – the harmonic building blocks of music and the musical foundation under a melody; study chord theory, and the fundamentals of musical structure.
-Scales and Melodic Patterns: Study the fundamental scales for guitar – another vital building block of guitar playing – as well as guitar melodic patterns or “licks,” tools that give you the ability to play lead guitar lines and melodies.
-Putting it All Together: From the very first lesson, put together what you’ve learned in real guitar tunes and pieces, covering a variety of different musical styles. Each lesson is capped off with a song that puts all the material to use.-Colin McAllister