Grade: all
Subject: Music

#2201. Play Guitar

Music, level: all
Posted Fri Mar 30 18:48:41 PST 2001 by Naftali Lahav+ (edu@nl-guitar.com).
Play Guitar
Stuio for Guitar, Kibbutz Mizra. P.O.Box: 0216 Israel 19312
Materials Required: love for music...and guitar
Activity Time: any time
Concepts Taught: Learn to Play Guitar all by yourself

Play Guitar seems to be the best method to study how to play guitar - by yourself! It has five chapters that gradually will teach you how to hold the guitar, how to produce a sound, how to tune, how to play very easy piece from tabs, how to read notes and at how to establish your first repertory.
You can also study on-line from here: http://www.nl-guitar.com/pgindex.htm

Playing any instrument, and guitar in particular, combines lots of elements coming together at the some time: Holding the guitar, left and right hand positions, plucking, reading notes, tempos, the sound of your guitar, expression... etc. The beginner may find it complicated to cope with all of these elements within the first lessons.
In this method, I suggest a graduated method to learn how to play guitar in an easy and direct way.
My purpose in the Play Guitar method is to teach ANYONE that has the willingness, to learn how to play the guitar.
The goal here is to guide you in the successful studying and playing of the guitar!
Bestowing good, basic, fundamental elements for the guitar are most important!!!
A guitar student that does not have proper basic elements of holding the guitar and placement of hands and fingers will surely enter the track of struggling with the instrument. In the long term, he or she may feel uncomfortable playing the guitar.

All the basic elements will be discussed out in the "How to..." chapter. Pay special attention to those pages.
After the "How to..." chapter, we shall start learning how to play, I suggest a numeric system, called Tablature or TAB, in which you will easily and quickly be able to achieve good, basic, fundamental elements of guitar playing.
The numeric system (TAB) has limitations, but since it based on graphic realization it has some significant advantages for the beginner because we can locate each tone visually.

Please read the explanation about our TAB system on page 7. It is not like the usual TAB - it is easier! If you want to skip the TAB to concentrate on the notes instead, please click

We shall use the numeric system (TAB) in Chapters I, II and III to accomplish two major goals:
1) Obtaining good basic positions and technique.
2) Playing some small pieces and melodies such as the Waltz, Malaguena, Blues, etc. within a short time. It may take only a month or two.

Than we shall progress to Chapter IV where we learn notes. We will find it much easier because we have already achieved some very important basic elements of playing the guitar.
In Chapter IV, Learning Notes, there is a significant expansion of music!
In fact, it is an entire Guitar Notes method - within the Play Guitar program!
Click for more information.

In the last chapter, Chapter V, let's presume you are a guitarist on the road. You will be working on your first guitar repertory. I selected some charming guitar works, which I hope you will enjoy learning.

I wish you an interesting and exciting guitar course.
I humbly invite guitar teachers to use the Play Guitar method in order to guide their own pupils.

Naftali Lahav

Have a great guitar course!!