Custom Made Electric Guitar

Save $100 off Summer 2013 Sale. Free Shipping Worldwide. Wholesale Guitars From China.No minimum. Visit Us at http://www.thetopguitars.com for more selections.

 

How to Play E-Based Major Barre Chords on Guitar

Unlike the guitar’s open-position chords, barre chords can move all around the neck of your guitar. A movable barre chord contains no open strings — only fretted notes. You can slide these fretted notes up or down the neck to different positions to produce other chords of the same quality.

One of the most useful movable barre chords is the one based on the open E chord. Barre chords get their names from the notes that you play on the 6th (low E) string. The best way to get a grip on this barre chord is to start out with an open-position E chord.

As you play a barre (pronounced “bar”), one of your left-hand fingers (usually the index) presses down all or most of the strings at a certain fret, enabling the remaining fingers to play a chord form immediately above (toward the body of the guitar) the barre finger. Think of your barre finger as a sort of movable nut or capo and your remaining fingers as playing certain open-position chord forms directly above it.

Play an open E chord, but instead of using the normal 2-3-1 left-hand fingering, use fingers 3-4-2.

This fingering leaves your first (index) finger free, hovering above the strings.

Lay your first finger down across all six strings on the other side of the nut (the side toward the tuning pegs).

Placing your index finger across the strings at this location doesn’t affect the sound of the chord because the strings don’t vibrate on that side of the nut, but it does give you the “feel” of a barre chord position.

Take the entire left-hand shape and slide it up one fret.

Your first finger should be barring the first fret, and your E-chord fingers should all have advanced up a fret as well. You’re now in an F-chord position (because F is one fret higher than E), and you can press down across all the strings with your index finger.

Try playing the notes of the chord one string at a time (from the 6th string to the 1st) to see whether all the notes ring out clearly.

The first few times you try this chord, the chances are pretty good that some of the notes aren’t going to ring clearly and that your left-hand fingers are going to hurt.

Because you can play an F chord as a barre chord, you can now, through the miracle of movable chords, play every major chord — all 12 of them — simply by moving up the neck. To determine the name of each chord, you simply have to know what note name you’re playing on the 6th (low E) string — because all E-based barre chords get their name from the 6th string (just as the open E chord does).
ibanez electric guitar

 

The Nuts and Bolts of Electric Guitars

Recognizing the different parts of the guitar is important, but knowing what makes an electric guitar work as a whole is essential to differentiate it from, say, a bassoon, accordion, or kazoo. Not that there’s anything wrong with those instruments, but try doing a windmill (a showy strumming technique where you extend your right arm out and move it in a circular motion, striking the guitar strings once a cycle — Pete Townshend is the windmill’s most famous practitioner) with a bassoon and they’ll cart you away quicker than your friends can ask the musical question, “Why is the bassoonist having a fit?”

String vibration and pitch

An electric guitar is a string, or stringed, instrument that creates musical sound through a vibrating string. Each string can produce a variety of different notes, but only one at a time. If you want to play two or more notes simultaneously, you must play them on different strings and strike them simultaneously. Because a standard electric guitar has six strings, it can play up to six simultaneous notes, but no more. (Consequently, guitarists more than make up for this “limitation” by playing extremely loudly.)

If you tighten a given length of string to a particular tension and then set it in motion (harpists by plucking, pianistsby striking, violinistsby bowing), the string will vibrate back and forth at a regular rate. This vibration produces a steady tone that we call pitch. The pitch remains the same as long as the string vibrates. As the string’s vibrations lose power, or intensity, over time, the note gets quieter, but its pitch doesn’t change.

Tension versus length

Two properties determine a string’s pitch: tension and length. Therefore, you can change a string’s pitch in one of two ways: by changing its tension (which you do when tuning or bending) or by changing its length (which you do when fretting — by changing the length of string allowed to vibrate). You must change pitch to play different notes, whether in a scale, a melody, or a chord progression.

You couldn’t do very much with a guitar, however, if the only way to change pitches was to frantically adjust the tension every time you pluck a string. You’d end up looking like the musical equivalent of the circus performer who spins those plates on a stick. So guitarists resort to the other way to change a string’s pitch — fretting.

And that’s why we have all this fretting about fretting: Fretting is the way guitarists change notes on the electric guitar. Without left-hand fretting, we could strike the guitar and make a lot of noise, but all the notes would sound the same — worse even than a speech by a boring politician.

One of the bigger differences between two icons of electric guitar models, the Gibson Les Paul and the Fender Stratocaster, is that their string lengths are different. The Les Paul has a vibrating string length of 24.75 inches; the Strat (as it’s known to its friends) has a vibrating length of 25.5 inches. Not much, maybe, but enough to make a perceptible difference to the hands.

Physics tells us that two different string lengths drawn to produce the same pitch (as they must to be in tune) will have different tensions. The Strat, because it has the longer string length, has slightly higher string tension than the Les Paul. This creates two key differences in playability for the electric guitarist: tighter, or springier, string response and larger frets in the Strat; and looser, or spongier, string response and smaller frets in the Les Paul.

But before you attempt to draw any conclusions, these descriptions are not value judgments; they do not indicate whether one aspect is good or bad versus the other. These qualities merely describe — hopefully without introducing bias or preference — the physical differences between the feel and playability of the different string tensions. Which one you prefer is just that — your preference. Most professional rock guitarists don’t even have an absolute, one-choice-fits-all guitar. Instead, they select guitars based on the type of music they want to play, and will have many different guitars at their disposal to handle a variety of musical styles.

Hands-on activity

Guitar playing requires you to use two hands working together, but performing different actions. This is different than playing, say, the piano or saxophone, where both hands perform the same type of action (striking keys and pressing keys, respectively). Guitar playing has the left hand selecting which notes to sound (by pressing down the strings against frets) and the right hand sounding those notes by striking (or plucking) the strings. And for you lefties, the ones who reverse the strings to play, please understand that “left” and “right” indicate the hand that frets and the hand that picks, respectively. That’s not a prejudice against lefties, it’s just that guitar convention dictates using “left” and “right” rather than “fretting” and “picking.”

At first, this might seem like the musical equivalent of rubbing your stomach and patting your head, but after a while, performing two different actions to produce one sound becomes second nature, and you don’t even have to think about it — like walking and chewing gum. And if you can’t do that, maybe you should think about running for office instead of playing rock guitar.

Pickups and amplification

Vibrating strings produce the different tones on a guitar. You must be able to hear those tones, however, or you face one of those if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest questions. For an acoustic guitar, hearing it is no problem because it provides its own amplifier in the form of the hollow sound chamber that boosts its sound . . . well, acoustically.

An electric guitar, on the other hand, makes virtually no acoustic sound at all. (Well, a tiny bit, like a buzzing mosquito, but nowhere near enough to fill a stadium or anger your next-door neighbors.) An electric instrument creates its tones entirely through electronic means. The vibrating string is still the source of the sound, but a hollow wood chamber isn’t what makes those vibrations audible. Instead, the vibrations disturb, or modulate, the magnetic field that the pickups — wire-wrapped magnets positioned underneath the strings — produce. As the vibrations of the strings modulate the pickup’s magnetic field, the pickup produces a tiny electric current.

If you remember from eighth-grade science, wrapping wire around a magnet creates a small current in the wire. If you then take any magnetic substance and disturb the magnetic field around that wire, you create fluctuations in the current itself. A taut steel string vibrating at the rate of 440 times per second creates a current that itself fluctuates 440 times per second. Pass that current through an amplifier and then a speaker and you hear the musical tone A. More specifically, you hear the A above middle C, which is the standard absolute tuning reference in modern music — from the New York Philharmonic to the Rolling Stones to Metallica.

 

The Top Guitars – the leading retailer of high quality customized guitars and basses

This company sells a wide range of high quality customized Guitars, major guitar brands, and collectible guitars. Owning the latest state of the art equipment, craftsmanship and skilled technicians. Dedicated in making the finest products satisfaction guaranteed. And also, offers free shipping worldwide with free hard case on selected items.

(1888PressRelease) March 29, 2011 – The Top Guitars can proudly boast one of the most experienced independent guitar stores in the world. Unlike some competitors you will find their prices identical whether you visit or order through mail order. The company continues to grow and develop every single day with new ideas, innovations and when the next big thing comes along, you better believe we’ll be here to bring it directly to your door and we emphasize not only on the product’s external appearance and fashionable design, but also the inner quality. Our products are exported to United States, Southeast Asia, and Europe. We take great pride in the quality and designs of our electric guitars and basses. From traditional to unique styles a United States masters instrument rates with the finest in detail, woods, finish, feel, components and consistency. Our designs incorporate some advanced high performance features, some patented, to improve on aspects of sonic response and feel, upper fret access, the ease of playing and comfort.

View the huge variety of guitars and accessories at http://www.thetopguitars.com.