Guitar: Expand your repertoire: An Open Learning Guide

You may not believe it at this stage, but with just the four chords G - Em - C - D you now have hundreds of songs open to you, so you can slowly start to build up a repertoire of songs for every occasion.

It is therefore worth opening your songbook and looking for songs that you may already be able to play.

Many libraries have songbooks that focus only on chord playing (and often copiers are available at low cost).

Browse music stores. There are now a lot of very good books, so there should be something for every taste. Books are often easier to handle than a loose collection of notes. You can also find many new pieces that you would not have thought of on your own. And the layout of the books is far superior to online printouts. And when you take into account the time and printing costs, a songbook is hardly more expensive than copying everything from the Internet. In addition, the quality of the arrangements is in most cases better than the Internet sources.

Even if there are excellent song collections with lyrics and chords only, as a beginner it is advisable to also buy songbooks with sheet music. Even if you can't read music "yet", the bar lines help you to recognize how long a beat pattern has to be sustained and when you have to change the chord. And even those who can't read music at all are able to look from bar line to bar line. Each bar line corresponds to a full beat pattern (in some songs even two beat patterns if one beat pattern would be far too slow).

The bar lines also make it much easier to find stumbling blocks, such as a quick chord changes or long pauses.

Even a tentative guessing of notes, where you only recognize that the higher the notes are in the staves, the higher a melody must be, helps to get an orientation for the course of the melody. Often, even quite limited note-reading skills are enough to at least find the starting notes of songs or, in more difficult passages, a clue as to how to continue.

A common feature of major and minor parallels is that the corresponding scales have the same accidentals. The "sharps" or "flats" in the staff tell you what kind of scale it is.

If a song has a sharp at the beginning of the staff, then it is either G major or the parallel E minor.

If it has no sharps at all, then it is either the key of C major or the parallel A minor. The key of C major is soon conquered in the Folk Diploma.

Source and licence

Text adapted from Guitar/Expand your repertoire 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.