Dansm's Acoustic Page

Dansm's Acoustic Guitar Basics
Welcome to Dansm's Acoustic Guitar Basics! This page is designed to give you a background on a lot of basic stuff for acoustic guitar. There will be lots of articles appearing here in the coming weeks. If you are a beginner, make sure you also check out Dansm's Advice for Beginning Guitarists. If you find the information on these pages useful, please consider e-mailing me.

Types of Acoustic Guitars
an outline of the types of acoustic guitars available: folk and classical

Parts of an Acoustic Guitar
an image showing important parts of the guitar, names of strings, and names of frets

Styles of Picking
a description of the two main styles of picking commonly used: flatpicking and fingerpicking

Tuning Your 6-String
Tuning Your 12-String
the best way to get in tune quickly

Using a Capo
the song says "capo 3rd", so what do I do?

Alternate Tunings
some of the basic alternate tunings used by acoustic guitarists

Humidity and Your Guitar
control the humidity around your guitar using this homemade guitar-case humidifer!

Amplification of Acoustic Guitars
a brief discussion of the main methods of amplifying acoustic guitars

Beginner's Guide to Chords
lessons to get you started with basic chords

Strumming Patterns
suggested strumming patterns for beginners

Warming Up
warm-up exercises to prevent injury and improve your playing

Guide to Hand Care
a collection of information on nail care, calluses, hand strength, and injury prevention

Guitar Techniques
basic techniques like slides, hammer-on, pull-off; explained for beginners

Making an Acoustic Guitar
photos from the Martin Factory Tour CD-ROM outlining the guitar-manufacturing process

Guitar String Ratings
my ratings of every brand of string ever played on my Martin

Guitar Chord Listing
here is a listing of all common guitar chords

Guitar Freeware
my collection of the best freeware for guitar: tuner, metronome, tablature, and chord software, plus more



Advice for Beginning Guitarists
a page designed to get you started with guitar, using lessons from across the net

Fingerpicking Lessons
if you've ever wanted to fingerpick, these lessons will get you started

Guitar Scale Lessons
scales are very important for mastering guitar, and these lessons will help you understand and learn them

Guitar Chord Theory
this page contains music theory lessons regarding guitar chords

Musical Notation
descriptions of tab, chord, and standard musical notation; designed so guitarists will understand


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© 1998 Daniel E. Smith. Last updated 5-16-99