Getting Clean Notes On Your Guitar

How To Get Clean Guitar Notes and Chords

Here are a few tips to getting a clean chords on your guitar, so your worship songs sound great

1. Trim your left-hand fingernails. If you have nails it’s impossible to hold the strings down cleanly.

2. Hold a string down with the tip, or pad, of your finger right behind the frets. If you hold a string down on top of a fret it can produce a muffled tone. If you hold down a string too far from the fret it can produce a buzzing sound. Stay on the tips of your fingers and hold each string firmly, as close to the frets as you can.

3. Only strum the strings that are actually part of the chords. For example, avoid strumming the 6th string when playing a D chord. The bass of a D chord is the 4th string. It sounds the cleanest to strum the top four strings for this chord. Strum just the strings in the chord and preferable with the bass string as the lowest. Here are a couple examples with number for the frets to hold down on each string:

D should not be strummed with 0 0 0 2 3 2, instead use x x 0 2 3 2
C should not be strummed with 0 3 2 0 1 0, instead use x 3 2 0 1 0

4. Keep your guitar in Tune. Invest in a good guitar tuner and use it every day. My favorite is the Headstock tuner since it tunes by the vibration of your instrument and not the audio sound. Hence, it doesn’t matter how noisy the environment is, it still works great.

These are a few simple tips that can improve the ‘sound’ of your playing.