Intro to Guitar Harmonics

Series Summary

You have finally arrived. After all of those endless hours of practicing chords and playing boring songs that have been outdated since the day they were written, you are finally ready to rock. No long do you have to contort your face into those anguished solo expressions and pretend you are playing a spotlight solo. With the tricky moves in this series, you are the star, the next Eddie Van Halen, the next Clapton. So go out and get yourself a band and get started on your rise to rock and roll success.

In this free series of advanced guitar instruction videos, you will learn all about guitar harmonics, from how to tune using harmonics to how play open chord as well as fret harmonics. Our expert will also demonstrate alternate picking techniques and finger-style arpeggios. As an added bonus, you will learn how to play power chords and hammer on notes. If you can master the lessons in this series, you have the skills to be a rock star. Now all you need is the attitude. But that's a different video series...

Video Transcript

"CASEY CORMIER: We'll begin this segment by talking about harmonic tuning. Now, we've already done some relative tuning using the 5th fret of the E string, 5th fret of the A string, 5th fret of the D, 4th fret of the G to match B, and 5th fret of the D. While we're going to be using harmonics on the 5th and 7th fret, harmonics being our fingers barely touching right above the fret, not actually putting in any pressure on. And these will sound as octaves-sometimes twice, sometimes 3 times as high as where they're actually been played. The interesting part is we'll be able to tune with these and when we check with our relative tuning, be able to tell if our guitar has good intonation or not. After we've learned and become comfortable to some of these harmonics, we'll be able to drop tuning. We'll be able to change the tuning of our guitar so, so far we have been playing a standard tuning E, A, D, G, B, and E. Well, when we start doing open tunings, we'll be able to play for example in drop-in open G tuning where we drop our E to a D, our A has become a G, you have a D, G, B, and then we drop our high E to a D2. When we strum this, it sounds like an open-an actual G chord that we play on standard tuning. We're going to learn how to tune there and how to tune back with harmonics 'cause we also want to you know-we rarely use open tuning but it is a fun thing to try out. Then we'll get into some more techniques. Partial chords, power chords, alternate picking-just some new techniques to make the things you've learned sound fresh and work in other genres. At the end of this session, we'll be talking about restringing the guitar. Something-it is very important for a guitarist to know how to do for themselves. Well, I'll demonstrate by restringing one string on my guitar and explaining how the rest of the strings can be restrung in a similar fashion. "