Guitar: Campfire Diploma: An Open Learning Guide

The Campfire Diploma is the first part of a multi-volume guitar school in the Wikibooks project guitar. The first volume teaches the basics of playing the guitar for hobby guitarists, that you can't get along without. The campfire diploma, including all songs, sheet music and tablature for guitar lessons, may be freely copied and used free of charge.

Despite the very limited learning material, on successful completion of the course you will be able to accompany hundreds of songs.

Unfortunately, due to strict copyright law, it is not possible to publish popular song lyrics with the appropriate accompaniment, but you can find the examples in many song books. We'll give you tips on which chords you can use to accompany well-known songs. This helps if the arrangements in the songbooks are not so convenient for the guitar beginner.

What you learn here will accompany you throughout your entire life as a guitarist. You can build on these basic techniques and come back to them again and again.

In the subsequent Folk Diploma you will learn more basic chords and accompaniment techniques.

In the Rock Diploma you will learn power chords and barre chords, and the topic of rhythm will be deepened.

In the Ballad Diploma the harmonies are expanded and further picking techniques are taught.

In the Rock Ballad Diploma you also transfer the extended harmonies to the barre chords and get a taste of jazz.

A lesson is intended for one unit per week (the time to practice and repeat the lesson is not included). There are a total of 8 lessons that teach chords, rhythms and a little harmony, so a lesson can have several chapters. In youth groups where there is a lot of singing (scouts, church youth work, etc.), many texts and melodies are familiar. These can be used as practice examples and you make rapid progress. If you have to concentrate more on learning the individual songs in class, each lesson can be spread over two or three weeks.

The lessons are structured in such a way that the material (i.e. the chords and strumming patterns) of the previous lessons is repeated. Therefore, you can move forward with the lessons, even if the last one is not yet completely error-free. Even if you miss a lesson in the group, the learning curve is so flat that you can easily make up for what you missed. So that the repetitions don't become boring for the other students, they are packaged in new songs.

Source and licence

Text adapted from Guitar/Campfire Diploma by Wikibooks contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.