So You Got a Guitar, Huh?

Description

A guitar is a great friend. Your guitar will be there for you through thick and thin. It doesn't even require
tender loving care. But that might help (it's a topic of another lesson). Even so, dinged up and rusty, your guitar will help
you find solace and peace in this crazy world.
If you are sitting there with your guitar and wondering what to do, you are on the right page. Here I will tell you
what the guitar really is and how it does what it does in very simple terms.

A guitar is, at its simplest, a piece of wire (called a
string) stretched tightly enough to make a sound when you hit it. Nothing a
guitarist does will produce a sound unless that wire vibrates. Now, when the
wire vibrates, the sound it makes can be high-pitched or low-pitched, or
somewhere in between.
The pitch of the sound depends on the size, tightness and length of the wire. You, as a guitarist, generally change
the pitch of the string by pushing it against the fingerboard hard enough to make it act
like a shorter string. The shorter the string, the higher the pitch. So, playing guitar is the act
of lengthening and shortening the string to make different pitches.

As a guitarist, you have two jobs:

1. 
   make the string vibrate
   
2. change the pitch of the string 
   

You have a few tools at your disposal, which you
will learn over the course of your playing. You can slide your finger up and
down the fretboard, you can bend the strings, all sorts of things. Your
first lessons will concentrate on striking the string, then shortening
the string by fingering it (pushing it down against the fretboard). Later
on, you will learn to bend it and manipulate it in other ways.