Crayon Sky Music

From the Fender Stratocaster to the Gibson Les Paul models, electric guitars have long found a high demand of music fans seeking to learn the at-times mystifying art of learning how to play. While it’s not a secret that becoming as good as Jimi Hendrix should take an appropriately long amount of time in terms of practice, experience, and self-dedication, actually learning how to play electric guitar is something almost anyone has the capacity to do. Most novice guitar players are encouraged to begin practicing the basics using an acoustic guitar that they can pluck, which also generally costs less to buy used than an electric guitar and amp. After they’ve become familiar with the guitar, new students of the electric guitar are ready to begin their journey into sound!

One of the first things to master when learning how to play the electric guitar is getting a good sound out of picking. While an acoustic guitar uses nylon strings, and can be plucked by hand, it actually sounds best when using a string pick against the steel-strings of an electric guitar. If you notice, the electric guitar includes a number of devices underneath the strings near to the bridge that aren’t present on an acoustic guitar. These devices are called ‘pickups’, which literally will pick up sound traveling from the picked strings and deploy them out to the amplifier, creating sound. The amp will also pick up external noise from other electronic devices, so be sure to avoid blasting the volume at night in case you end up getting a very wicked amount of feedback that will disturb half of the neighborhood!

When you’ve begun to take lessons to learn how to play electric guitar, you are essentially learning how to balance the relationship between the guitar, the pickups and the amplifier all at once. The placement of the pickups determines the type of sound as much as, if not more than, the actual picking of guitar strings itself does. Also, depending on which type of amplifier used the sound will either be more/less darker, more/less distorted, or more/less resonant in tone than the next amplifier. If it seems like a lot of variables to manage while learning how to play the electric guitar, that’s because it is-this is why it is recommended to learn the basics on an acoustic before tackling the electric guitar.

For all its difficulties, there are marked advantages of learning how to play the electric guitar. Instead of dealing with an awkward, bulky shape due to the need to have natural acoustic resonance when learning on an acoustic, the electric guitar doesn’t have to be hollow, freeing the form and shape of the instrument to fit with a player’s body more comfortably while playing. Many electric guitar players have their guitars custom made to take full advantage of the flexibility in shape. There are also other unique types of electric guitars for different genres of music, like the double-neck, the archtop, or electric bass guitar, all of which can be played by those learned in the art of the electric guitar.

“Nattlunk” – Fred Kinbom & Michael Gomez (Weissenborn lap slide and Gibson archtop)