Guitar

What can I say about the guitar that hasn’t already been said?  After learning to play the ukulele at a very young age, I soon progressed to the guitar.  It was my second instrument to learn.  Chords have similar forms on both the uke and the guitar, but the guitar adds a couple of more strings…and it’s tuned different than the uke.  One thing I’d like to mention right off the bat is that the guitar is tuned in 5-fret intervals (a perfect fourth)…mostly.  The string with the lowest tone is normally tuned to an E note and the subsequent strings increase in pitch by five frets…with one exception (which is not important right now).  This has a lot of applications to chord theory and chord progressions.  On the dobro page, I discuss one of the first important things I learned from Jeff Newman…and that was the Up5 and Down5 change concept.  Applying that to the guitar, which is tuned in fifths, means that when you make a chord and move all of your fingers down one string on the fret board, it’s like you’ve moved up 5 frets!  I know…that B string throws a kink in here…but think about the ramifications!!!  I’ll surely touch on that later…or in some classes!  -Boyd

Leave a Reply