Lesson four in the guitar lessons for beginners series dips your toe in the waters of music theory.  While you aren’t going to understand music the way Mozart did, by the end of this lesson you should have an idea of why things sound the way they do and be able to begin thinking about how you want to chart your own course in learning to play the guitar.  Do you want to learn more ‘rock-ish’ sounding playing styles or would you rather learn a more ‘country’ sound… or maybe blues is your thing.  The lead guitar notes you play determine the mood.  All the tools your need to learn any playing style are covered in the DVD series (previewed here).

What we’ve done with this lesson is we’ve asked you to take the recording you made in lesson two (beginner chord progressions), and play a simple solo over it using the pentatonic minor scale we taught you in lesson three (guitar note charts – scales).  We then instruct you to play the same solo in a specific different position on the neck and compare the sound of the two solos.  Which solo do you like better?  Depending on your answer you’ll be better prepared as to where to focus your energies when looking at the complete basic guitar lesson DVD series to develop your own style.