Alright for starters I recommend that you start playing sitting down and that you are in a chair or stool without arms
so you have plenty of room to move around and get comfortable.
You want to make sure that the chair or stool is low enough to the ground or that there are braces on the legs
so that your knee is at a ninety degree angle or slightly less.
That gives you a nice comfortable way to rest your guitar on your leg.
We will go over strap height later.
For now we will practice sitting down unless you've got a back problem.
Sitting is just a good comfortable way to start.
The other thing you want to make sure you are doing especially if you are in a stool it is really easy to lean too far forward
and put too much strain on your back.
Which you won't really notice for a while when you're practicing but you might get up and your upper back maybe even your lower back
will be a little bit sore.
So make sure you're not hunched over guitar too much make sure you are sitting upright.
Check your posture every now and again and make sure you are not slouching to much.
Now a really common mistake people make when they start playing is positioning their left arm strangely.
You want to make sure that when you've got your hand out here that your elbow isn't too far in or too far out.
When people start fretting chords sometimes they will bring their elbow in here to compensate for their hand
not being coordinated enough to play the chord.
Don't do that.
Make sure your wrist is nice and straight and that you are leaving plenty of room between your arm and your body.
As far as left hand position
what you want to start out doing is make sure that this joint of your thumb
is placed on the hump of the neck or the highest part of the neck directly in the middle.
So if I show you the back of the neck here is where my thumb should be.
Here is the joint of my thumb and it's right in the middle of the neck where the curvature is at, at it's peak.
That's going to give me plenty of support when I am playing notes and it's going to give me plenty of grip when I'm playing chords.
Having my thumb here also gives me plenty of room for my hand to move around out here.
Notice if I have my thumb up here like you notice some guitarists do it limits the amount of hand you have in front of the neck
and makes it harder to play.
It is ok to get to this point eventually but for now make sure that your thumb is back
and you have got plenty of hand out here to deal with things.
Ok. So we have talked a lot about the guitar.
Most electric guitars are played through an amp.
Let's talk a little bit about the amp.
Grab your instrument cable plug in your guitar turn your amp on and make some noise.
Most basic amps and you want to start with a basic amp they are going to have the following sections.
They are going to have a volume nob.
They are going to have a general EQ with highs lows and mids that you can turn to kind of get your tone exactly the way you want it.
Then they are going to have a pre and a post section and this is where some people get confused.
Your pre and your post section is going to be part of the second channel on a two channel amp.
Which most amps are. You are going to have a clean channel and you are going to have a dirty channel.
Your dirty channel which is the channel that I'm on now
is going to give you the distorted sound that you hear on most rock music.
The pre and the post nobs are going to be able to determine how much distortion you have
versus how much clean sound you have on that channel.
Your post acts as the overall volume for that channel.
Your pre acts as the amount of gain or the amount of dirtiness that you are going to have.
Those usually operate independently of the clean volume.
So if you've got a foot pedal or just a little switch on your amp you can set two different sounds and switch back and forth.
Some amps have a shared EQ.
Share high low and mid nobs and some amps have different high low and mid nobs for each one of those channels.
I recommend when we start practicing chords that you have a pretty clean sound to start out with.
Of course experiment as much as you possibly can with different sounds and find out what works for you.
There is a summary on your amp and a good first look at your guitar.
Join me for my next lesson in the beginner lesson series where we are going to start learning our first chords.