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Lesson 2: Holding the Guitar There are two basic ways to hold your guitar, if your just starting out you'll want to be sitting down to start off, but try to move to standing up fairly soon. It's much easier to learn both ways at once rather than learn one way and try to switch after. Sitting Down To hold your guitar while sitting down simply rest the body of the guitar on your right knee (for right handed players), rest your right elbow on the top of the body and let your hand hang where you strum. (Over the pickups for electric guitar players and over the center hole for acoustic players.) Then take your left hand and with your palm facing back, have your thumb on the back of the neck and your fingers on the front.
Standing Up A strap is definatly required to play standing up. Have the strap coming from the left side strap hook, up over your left shoulder, then down behind your back, under your right arm to the right hand strap hook.
Picking In your strumming hand a lot of rock players use picks. These are small thin plastic pieces that come in various shapes, designs, colors, and thicknesses. They will help you with your accuracy and speed. A lot of acoustic players however choose either not to use picks, or to use clip on picks, so they can use the other three fingers to get a little more freedom when playing acoustic riffs. Here are some examples of picks:
Your left hand will be manipulating the strings. It'll hurt at first but you'll soon be able to push all the strings down and slide around without any pain! Now, enough with the pre-action theory.. lets play some guitar! < Previous | NiceaXe.com | Lesson Three >
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