Taking Flight: Guitar Lessons from Life

What does football have to do with music? What wisdom can Vince Lombardi possibly shed on the topic of guitar lessons? The Legendary Green Bay Packers coach is famous the world around for turning losers into champions. He did it in three short years by shifting the player's thinking, building their enthusiasm, and getting back to the basics. I just came across a great quote credited to him, "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm." I had to think about that for a minute.

So much of music, from practice to performance is about mindset. It can be pretty exciting getting set up to play guitar, shopping for the right one, buying accessories, gearing up to finally live your dream. If it's so exciting, why are so many beautiful guitars sitting in the closet or under the bed? I think it has a lot to do with why the Green Bay Packers were always loosing.

The story goes that Vince Lombardi started every season with, "This is a football." To really get going with your guitar lessons, you need to start with, "This is a guitar." Get familiar with all the parts of the instrument. Look at your guitar and for lesson one, find all the parts, everything from the headstock to the tail piece and end piece. Beyond these three things, here's a list of the parts you should know where to find:
Bridge
Body
Fingerboard
Neck
Frets
Nut
Tuning pegs
If you're playing an electric guitar, you also need to find the tone and volume controls, the electric chord socket, the back pickup (for lead) and the front pickup (for rhythm).

Next, let's look at the strings. Here's a quick lesson in physics and sound acoustics. Guitar lessons are not complete without some fundamentals here. The frequency of sound is determined by specific physical elements of an instrument. The length of a pipe on a flute determines it's pitch, so as you close off the holes and the air stream inside the pipe gets longer, the pitch gets lower. With guitars, the pitch is determined by the length and thickness or gauge of the string. By angling the bridge just right, the beginner guitar player needs to learn to change the string length to help create the right pitch.

The notes (pitches) of your six strings are as follows: E, A, D, G, B, E. If you have access to a piano, you can tune your guitar to that. Otherwise, you'll need to invest in a guitar tuner and begin getting comfortable with the tuning process. This is a football. This is a guitar. Start with the basics.