So you’ve decided to spice up your music career with acoustic guitar lessons by learning to play the guitar.  Whether you’re interested in improving your performance or beginner guitar lessons, you’ll find some valuable information on these pages.  Many of the principles taught here are common whether you’re interested in electric or acoustic guitar lessons.  Fingering will be similar with the exception that in playing the electric guitar you would learn to do much more bending, hammer-on and pull-off type techniques.  You can accomplish these with acoustic guitar as well but because hollow body guitars are simply not built with these techniques in mind, they’re much more common with electric guitar.  With learning to play the guitar, acoustic guitar lessons employ much more ‘flat picking’.  Of course playing acoustic guitar licks on electric guitar are much easier than the reverse.  Let’s take a look at beginner guitar lessons for flatpicking.

Learning to play the acoustic guitar - Flatpicking

If you’re pursuing beginner guitar lessons and interested in playing bluegrass or country lead guitar you’ll want to begin by learning the technique of ‘flatpicking’.  A good place to start is with fiddle tunes.  They’re a great source of music and provide an opportunity to develop your right hand picking technique.

One of the best approaches to getting started playing a steady stream of up tempo eighth notes in time, is to consistently alternate between downstrokes and upstrokes.  Let’s take a count of 4 and add ‘and’ between each count.  The result is 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.  You get the idea?  Now let’s play with a downstroke on the numbers and an upstroke on the ands.  Go slow.  Always learn new picking techniques by starting slowly and building up your speed.  Never play faster than is possible to play accurately.  Otherwise you’ll only be perfecting your mistakes.

You can practice this technique with a single note to start and gradually build to 2 then 3 or more notes.