John Auker

John Auker

From Hard Days Night

John Auker began studying music at the age of ten, starting on violin and moving to guitar two years later. His parents enrolled him in guitar lessons at age 12, and they luckily found a great teacher from the start. They stuck with his first instructor, Shawn Bradshaw for six years. At first, Mr. Bradshaw guided John through his favorite songs by Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Eric Clapton, Nirvana, Santana and Stevie Ray Vaughan. After a couple years the lessons got tougher, ch... (more)

John currently offers 72 guitar lessons at JamPlay, with 27 beginner lessons, 8 song lessons and 37 lessons in our Artist Series.

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Vintage Rock Guitar for Beginners

Learning something new is fun and exciting, particularly if it is something we really enjoy. Still, it can sometimes be challenging not knowing where or how to begin, especially when learning how to play a musical instrument. John Auker is here to show us the ropes while teaching us the fundamental concepts and techniques needed to hit the ground running with our guitar playing.

1

OPTIONAL LESSON - Getting to Know Your Electric Guitar

Guitars come in several shapes and configurations, and as an absolute beginner, this can confuse matters before you even get started. In this opening lesson, Dave Isaacs will discuss the name and function of the various parts of an electric guitar.

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2

OPTIONAL LESSON - Tuning and String Names

Now that we've covered the guitar itself, let's discuss each string and how to tune them!

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3

OPTIONAL LESSON - Putting Your Hands on the Guitar

Using the correct positioning and posture while playing can save a lot of frustration and possibly even injury. In this lesson, Dave will cover the proper techniques to help us be comfortable and proficient in our playing.

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4

OPTIONAL LESSON - Understanding Notation Through Shape and Direction

Tablature can be a useful stepping stone, helping us familiarize ourselves with printed music for the guitar, and with a bit more work - standard notation. Here, Dave will discuss the basics of tablature and how it associates with the location and direction of the notes on the fretboard.

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5

Course Introduction

Let's join John as he explains what he will be teaching in the coming lessons and what we can expect to learn from taking this course

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6

Your First Melody

John will start things off with this lesson by teaching us how to play our first riff using only one finger on our fretting hand and only downstrokes with our picking hand

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7

Get a Rhythm

In this lesson, John breaks down everything we need to know about rhythm and timing including measures, beats, and subdivisions of the beat

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8

Your First Chords - Power Chords!

Now that we know more about rhythm, in this next lessons we can begin learning how to play some basic chords, starting with power chords

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9

Muting

There are certain situations in music that require us to not play or make any noise with our instrument or when we may need to change the dynamic of our sound. We can use different muting techniques in these situations and John will demonstrate a few of them in this lesson

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10

Intervals and Frets

It's time for us to learn some very basic music theory starting with intervals and how they relate to the notes on the neck of the guitar in this lesson

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11

Your First Song - Lightnin Flash

For our next lesson, we will learn how to play our first song using all of the techniques we have learned so far

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12

Your Second Melody - Another Way!

In this next lesson, John will show us how we can reach all of the notes we need to play across multiple strings while keeping our fretting hand in one position

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13

5 Note Magic!

John shows us how to play our first scale in this lesson, the G Major pentatonic scale

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14

New Chords!

In this lesson, we will learn to play versions of the G and C chords that only require us to use one finger

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15

The Universal Strum

Up next, John will teach us an important strumming pattern that can be used for almost any song that we want to play

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16

Your Second Song - Do Love Me

Now it is time for us to put the pieces together from the last few lessons and play our second full song in this lesson

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17

Multiple Finger Pentatonic Melody

In our next lesson, John will show us how to play a melody using multiple fingers on our fretting hand

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18

Growing Your Chords

For our next lesson, we will learn how we can expand our chords by adding new notes

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19

Triple Meter

While most popular music is in 4/4 time, other time signatures are often used to give a piece of music a different feel. In this lesson, John shows us how to play in different time signatures

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20

More Notes Join the Scale!

John will use this lesson to show us how to transform a pentatonic scale into a major scale by adding just a few notes

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21

Here Come Ol' Flat Finger

In this lesson, John shows us how we can flatten a finger on our fretting hand to play double stops, barres, and finger rolls

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22

Your Third Song - Sand in My Hand

It's time for us to put all of the pieces together and play our third song along with the track in this lesson

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23

Bluesing up Your Chords!

For our next lesson, John will show us one technique that we can use to add movement and texture to our rhythm playing by modifying some of our chords

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24

Still Growing!

Let's take our chords one step further in this lesson by adding a third finger and playing full chord shapes for each of the chords that we have learned so far in this course

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25

Early Rock Bassline

In our next lesson, we will learn how to play the bass line for our track, which was inspired by the early rock and roll sound

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26

The Nitty Gritty Details

John teaches us about using a few common articulations in our playing and displays how each of these techniques adds a new element to our sound

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27

Your Fourth Song - On a Trail

It's time to take all of the information and techniques that we learned in this course and apply it to playing our last song in this lesson

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