How to Play The Guitar for Campfire Songs

The camaraderie of singing round a campfire is so much more enjoyable with someone leading the song accompaniments. Unfortunately, we don't always have an instrumentalist with us during camping. Why not try to learn playing the guitar yourself? It's not that complicated. And you don't really need to shell out bucks to hire a tutor. All you need is a guitar, patience, perseverance and a little helping hand to guide you to free online resources. Here's a simplified set of instructions for aspiring campfire guitarists:

Figuring out tablature. You don't need to know how to read notes in order to play the guitar. A lot of guitar sheet music uses tablature. Tablature is a miniature illustration of the guitar frets and strings, and indicates which particular strings to press, at what fret, and which fingers to use.

The guitar has 6 strings, with the bottommost string as the first string, that is, if you are holding the guitar in the normal way. The bottommost string is the thickest and makes the lowest sounds. The sixth string, on the other hand, is the topmost string, and produces the highest pitch. Plucking the strings successively from bottom to top, without pressing on any frets, produces the following notes: E, A, D, G, B, and higher E.

If you look along the neck of the guitar, you would notice that the whole fingerboard, underneath, the strings are divided into sections. These sections are the guitar frets. The strings were meant to be pressed on to the spaces between the frets to produce specific pitch sounds. The very first fret is the one located at the far end of the guitar's neck, near the string tuners. If you're a beginner, it is advisable to choose a guitar with numbered frets so you don't have a difficult time locating frets.

For purposes of identifying which fingers to use for pressing the strings, your fingers are numbered 1-4, starting with the index finger. That means, your index finger is designated finger 1, your middle finger as finger 2, your ring finger as finger 3, and your little finger as finger 4. The thumb is generally used to support the back of the fingerboard.

Now, all you have to do is match your fingers, the guitar strings and frets, to the corresponding parts of the tablature. The easiest chord to learn is E minor: You just need fingers 2 and 3 to press on the fourth and fifth strings on the second fret, then strum on all the strings. Voila! The E minor chord!

A lot of campfire songs make use of a combination of just three basic chords, that is the tonic, dominant and subdominant chords. For example, chords C, G, and F go together; Likewise, chords G, D, and C. For your beginning piece, choose one that has a minimal number of chords, so you'd only have to master around 3 finger positions.

You can consult any available guitar chord chart for the tablature of each chord. There are also free online interactive guitar chords generator in music websites such as Chordbook, All-guitar-chords and Gootar.

Aline Heller writes on music education. To learn more about campfire guitar songs, go to The Great American Campfire. Another resource is Singing Superstar.

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