Rock Guitar Lessons: What You Need To Know

Are you searching for rock guitar lessons to improve your guitar playing? Keep on reading and I’ll share a few things that you need to know when it comes to finding the best rock guitar lessons.

Rock Guitar Lessons Fundamentals

The following list of common rock guitar playing techniques should be included in whichever rock guitar lessons you choose to take:

• Power chords
• Palm muting
• String bending
• Hammer ons and pull offs
• Pentatonic scale

Power chords

Understanding and being able to effectively play power chords is vital to any rock guitar lessons as it’s the foundation of rock guitar rhythm playing that needs to be mastered. Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Nirvana, Foo Fighters and Green Day, they have all used power chords in their music.

In its simplest form, they are a chord made up of just two notes but how you use them is what gives rock guitar playing its unique style.

Palm muting

This is another technique in rock guitar rhythm playing that should be covered in rock guitar lessons. Palm muting involves lightly resting the palm of your picking hand on the strings near the bridge of the guitar.

This creates a slight choked or muffled sound which gives a nice contrasting sound to openly strumming power chords in rhythm rock guitar playing.

String bending

Whereas power chords and palm muting are techniques more associated with rhythm playing, string bending is a technique more for rock lead or solo playing. It takes patience and practice to be able to consistently bend notes in tune and any decent rock guitar lesson should be able to provide exercises to develop this guitar skill.

Hammer ons and pull offs

This is another lead rock guitar technique which should be studied and mastered. A hammer on is, for example, where you pick one note using the first finger to fret a note and then use your third finger to hit the fretboard to make a higher note sound out.

A pull off is the opposite to a hammer on where you pick, for example, a note fretted with your third finger which then lifts off the fretboard to sound a lower note already fretted by the first finger.

Once mastered, it allows a guitarist to play faster with less effort.

Pentatonic scale

Any decent rock guitar lessons should include sessions on understanding how to use the pentatonic scale. While it’s not actually a technique as such, it is the fundamental scale which a lot rock guitar solos are built upon.

Most scales consist of seven notes but the pentatonic scale only uses fives. It’s a simple yet very powerful and expressive scale used for lead rock guitar playing.

Learning to play rock guitar requires understanding and mastering a certain set of skills and techniques. We’ve outlined five which are necessary to help you improve your playing so make sure any rock guitar lessons you undertake include these and a whole lot more.