So, You Wanna Be a Rock Superstar?
Jan 25th, 2009 by Ealeal
Now that our fingers have fully recovered from hours upon hours of intensive Guitar Hero and Rock Band training, the team at 5min is fully prepared to harness the power of the real thing – yes, we’re talking about that classic wooden instrument long associated with a rockin’ good time – the guitar.
Luckily for us, 5min is rocking steady with thousands of great guitar tutorials, many of them geared at newbies like ourselves. Alongside leading names in guitar and musical instruction such as iVideosongs, Spytunes, Lick Library, Live To Jam and DolphinStreet, there is also a long list of industrious guitarists who have been busy uploading their excellent guitar tutorial videos to the 5min platform, offering a rich variety of levels, styles and teaching methods for every aspiring guitarist.
But let’s aside our fantasies of rockstardom aside for a moment – after all, you gotta learn how to crawl before you can run, and before we can dream of hollering “THANK YOU MILWAUKEE!” at a crowd of thousands or dominating the stage at Madison Square Garden, we need to at least master a few basic chords.
Obviously, there’s still a long, long road ahead of us before anyone in the office can tear it up like Zakk Wylde, but at least now we have something to aspire to:
So you wanna be a guitar hero? The guitar is a wonderful instrument and can open up whole new worlds, but picking up a guitar and getting started can be intimidating. Here are some 5min guitar pointers for those of you who want to rock:
- Tune your guitar. When picking up a guitar with the intent of learning how to play, the ideal start is a well-tuned guitar. Don’t know how to tune a guitar? Fear not – learn how to easily tune your guitar here!
- Learn how to read guitar tabs. Guitar tablatures, or tabs, are a system of musical notations used when playing guitar. In tabs, each line corresponds to a string on the guitar, and each number displayed tells you which fret you should be holding down when plucking a given string string.
- Learn and practice your chords. While its true that the Ramones did just fine with only three chords, you may want to beef up on your chord knowledge in order to enable you to play a variety of musical styles and tunes. After all, Freebird can get a little dry after a while…
We will continue with our rigorous guitar training, and expect you all to do the same. In the meantime… Rock loud, rock proud, and rock on!
Excellent blog, I like the video pointer, It helped me a little along the way. Thanks