How to Play Electric Guitar: Lesson One - Learn Electric Guitar Parts

So you're interested in learning how to play electric guitar? No problem. These series of lessons will take you step by step. If you're just starting out, you should find these lessons pretty useful. For the purpose of our first lesson, I shall make things very simple and assume that you have never played a guitar before and probably don't even own one. Although this section focuses primarily on how to play the electric guitar, it really doesn't matter if you're gonna be playing any other type of guitar (electric-acoustic, acoustic, or classical).

How to play electric guitar - parts of an electric guitar

The first thing I want you to learn are the parts of the guitar. Check out the diagram below for an overview.

In learning how to play electric guitar, a lot of focus will be placed on the next part we shall talk about, none other but the neck of the guitar. This is where you will be placing your fingers a lot and holding different positions to create different notes.

The neck of the guitar is attached to the body. On the body of your electric guitar, you will find pickups. These are almost like microphones. They pick up, or capture the sound of the instrument so they can be amplified. (If you've got an acoustic or acoustic/electric guitar, your guitar would come with a sound hole. This hole is found on the body of the guitar and is meant to amplifier the sound of the guitar.) Electric guitars replace this part with pick-ups.

There's a pickup switch located on the body of the guitar used to select different pickups for different tones and sounds.

Next in line is the bridge of your guitar. It is a piece of hardware attached to the body of the guitar. The strings run from the tuning pegs to the bridge.

Then there's the tremolo (aka Whammy Bar). This is a bar connected to the bridge of the guitar. By moving the tremolo bar up or down, you can move the bridge, thus changing the pitch.

On the body of an electric guitar, you will find volume and tone control knobs used to adjust guitar volume and tone.

Before you begin the actual process of learning how to play electric guitar, let's talk a little more about the neck of the guitar. In particular, we shall focus on the frets. What are these? These are strips of metal running along the surface of the guitar's neck. Guitarists also refer to the space between two strips of metal as a fret. So the fret can mean two different things.

If you want to learn how to play electric guitar, you must first know these parts. Take time to learn them because they are important for understanding subsequent lessons.

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