Hi and welcome to Week One of guitar lessons in the music coach program. We're gonna get started on a really great journey learning how to play the guitar. The guitar is an amazing instrument that allows you to both play melodies and chords and sing all at the same time. And in this program, you're going to be learning how to play a group of chords and the melody to our sections of our song, as well as starting out improvising. So to get started, we're going to first talk about the parts of the guitar. So when the lessons are happening, you understand which parts I'm speaking about.

So a guitar we talked about it a lot like a person. It has a head, a neck, and a body. And inside the neck are frets which are little metal strips that divide the neck up into different sections and where You place your hands on the neck gives you different notes depending on what strings you're on. Now we're going to be using the musical alphabet, which goes from A to G. And if you're unfamiliar with that, there are some videos at the beginning of the course that are animated that can help you understand the musical alphabet, and rhythms and harmony and things like that. This week's practice video is going to help you get to really know the names of the strings, which is an often overlooked part at the beginning for people starting out on the guitar, it's really important to know which string you're on.

Also in which direction you're going so from the largest string to the smallest string, and from the smallest string back to the largest string. So the names of the strings are E, A, and D, and G, B, and E One thing that's going to happen in the practice video is that when you're picking down towards the floor, I want you to pick down on the string. So starting with your pick on the top of the string, picking down. When you're picking up, I want you to do the opposite and put your pick underneath a string and pull up towards your body. This helps you later on get used to alternating the direction that your pick is moving in, which helps you to play certain parts faster. Now, the pic, I want you to hold it like a pen or a pencil with your fingers right down towards the tip.

So your thumb goes on the back and your pointer finger goes on the front. And you can let the rest of your fingers relax. For now we're only going to be using the pick to strum chords and play notes. later on. There's techniques where we're going to use our fingers as well. All right, great work, and we'll see in the practice video.