Stepping forward on our way to mastering the skills for reading tabs and playing easy guitar lessons for beginners, here is the second exercise of a planned series of simple and easy, though very nice and useful, beginner guitar exercises.

It aims to keep developing your fretting and plucking skills, as well as helping you grow your musical appreciation.

Here is the second exercise of a series of simple and easy, though very nice and useful, reading and playing exercises I teach to my beginner guitar students. They love it. It aims to keep developing your fretting and plucking skills, as well as helping you grow your musical appreciation.

As every exercise or study has, this one has also its own goals, requirements and particularities.

So, what are the goals of this first exercise?

Besides growing flexibility of both hands fingers and independence between left and right hands, it will help you to keep notes sounding during all their required lengths, expanding your discerning ability for quality music playing.

You will need not to forget the name conventions we stated in Exercise 1.

Now, here's the exercise!

E -------0-|---------|-------0-|---0-2-3-|---2-4-5-|-------0-|---------|---||
B ---2-3---|---0-2-3-|---2-3---|---------|---------|---2-3---|---0-3---|---||
G ---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|---------|-------1-|-2-||
D ---------|---------|---------|---------|-0-------|---------|---------|---||
A -0-------|---------|-0-------|-0-------|---------|-0-------|---------|-0-||
E ---------|-0-------|---------|---------|---------|---------|-0-------|---||

It will be most useful to you to download a free music score and a free midi file (which you can listen to) of this exercise.

Now, what does the tab mean?

Let's go to the first bar.

You will play it this way:

- First pluck the open 5th string with the thumb finger of your right hand.
- Then the 2nd string, fretted at the 2nd fret, plucked with the index finger of your right hand.
- Then the 2nd string, fretted at the 3rd fret, plucked with the middle finger of your right hand.
- And then the open 1st string, plucked with the index finger of your right hand.

Now you will play the second bar, and the the rest of them, remembering that you will use fingers 1, 2 3 and 4 of your left hand to fret strings in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th frets, correspondingly, except for the 5th bar, where you will use fingers 1, 3 and 4 to fret the 1st string in 2nd, 4th and 5th frets.

At 8th bar, you will play together (at the same time), the 5th string open and the 3rd string pressed at the 2nd fret with your finger 2.

You will play all notes on the 6th, 5th and 4th strings with you right hand thumb finger,

and all notes on the 3rd, 2nd and 1st strings with your right hand index and middle fingers alternately.

As usual, Keep trying until you get:

- A clean sound every time you pluck a string .
- A not interrupted duration of each played note.
- A continuous playing, not delaying from one bar to he next.

OK, now! Go try it! You'll find it very easy and nice. See you soon in the next exercise.