Guitar Lesson 01: your guitar, tuning, and your first four chords

Watch Batio's full lesson above, then use this as your written companion. It walks the whole thing start to finish: the parts of your guitar, how to tune it, and the four chords he teaches at the end. Every chord is drawn out below so you can practice straight from the page while the video plays.

Start at square one

Batio opens with his one rule for beginners: start at the very beginning. He warns that teachers often start students "a little too advanced," so problems show up later because you never learned square one. This lesson is, in his words, "for the person that really knows nothing." That patience is the whole point. Learn each piece correctly before you move on.

The parts of your guitar

Batio spends the first ten minutes naming every part. Here is the tour, in his order.

The body is the big slab resting against you. It holds all the controls, and it is where your picking hand works. The neck is what your other hand wraps around, and where you press the strings down to make notes. The flat front of the neck is the fretboard, and the thin metal strips across it are the frets. The headstock is the top end, usually stamped with the maker's brand (Batio plays Sawtooth guitars exclusively). On the back of the headstock are the tuning pegs, which tighten or loosen each string to change its pitch.

Plug a cable from the guitar into an amp and you get sound. Under the strings sit the pickups, and there are two basic kinds. Humbuckers use two coils so they cancel hum and stay almost noise-free. Older single-coils use one coil and get noisy at high volume. The pickup near the neck (the neck pickup) gives a round, warm sound. The one near the bridge (the bridge pickup) is harder and meaner, the choice for rock, metal, and lead lines.

Near the bottom, the strings run over the bridge, which has small adjustments that set the guitar's intonation (Batio notes a good guitar comes intonated from the factory). The dots on the neck are fret markers. They tell you where you are, and they also mark where natural harmonics live, like the one at the 12th fret, exactly halfway up the string.

The pickup selector (a three-position toggle) chooses which pickup you hear: neck for a round tone, the middle for a funky, almost country sound, bridge for the heavy stuff. The volume and tone knobs control each pickup, plus a master position; most players keep the volume on 10 and roll the tone back to soften the treble. The nut, a small slotted piece where the neck meets the headstock, is one of the two points every string passes over (the bridge is the other). Finally, plug your cable into the input jack and, as Batio puts it, "you are louder than god."

One more piece of vocabulary: the strings are numbered. String 1 is the thinnest, and you count down to string 6, the thickest.

Tune up before you play a note

Around eleven minutes in, Batio calls tuning the real first skill. A standard guitar is tuned to standard pitch, built around concert A at 440 vibrations per second. From the thinnest string to the thickest, the six open strings are E, B, G, D, A, E.

e |--0--   1st string, high E (thinnest)
B |--0--   2nd string, B
G |--0--   3rd string, G
D |--0--   4th string, D
A |--0--   5th string, A
E |--0--   6th string, low E (thickest)

Here is the rule Batio hammers on, the one most beginners get wrong: always tune up to the note, never down. If a string is sharp, drop it below the note first, then come back up. Tuning down leaves slack between the nut and the peg, and that slack slips out the moment you play, pulling the string flat. Tune up and it holds. A cheap clip-on tuner is all you need.

What a chord is

A chord, Batio says, is "four or more notes played together." His own first teacher showed him four of them that combine into a little song, and every one uses only the top four strings (strings 1 through 4). Those are the four you will learn now.

Your first four chords

Two rules carry through all of them. First, no banana: do not let a fretting finger collapse flat, curve it so only the tip presses the string. Second, daylight: arch your hand so there is space between your palm and the neck, which lets every string ring instead of getting muffled. Fret just behind the metal fret, toward the body of the guitar.

G major. One finger. Put your third finger on the 3rd fret of the 1st string (the thinnest). Leave strings 2, 3, and 4 open, and do not play strings 5 and 6. Strum from the 4th string down.

G7. From G, this is a one-finger move. Take your first finger and put it on the 1st fret of the 1st string. Strings 2, 3, and 4 stay open. Practice sliding between G and G7 until the change is smooth.

C major. Two fingers. First finger on the 1st fret of the 2nd string (B), second finger on the 2nd fret of the 4th string (D). Strings 1 and 3 ring open. Arch your hand so all four notes sound.

D7. Batio calls this the hard one. First finger on the 1st fret of the 2nd string (B), second finger on the 2nd fret of the 3rd string (G), third finger on the 2nd fret of the 1st string (high E). The 4th string (D) stays open. Strum all four strings, only four, not six.

Put it together

Batio's four chords become a piece of music in this order: G, G7, C, D7, and back to G. Play it slowly, one chord at a time. Do not chase speed. Make every string in each shape ring clean before you move to the next chord. That is the entire goal of lesson one.

Practice this

Two tasks today. First, tune up: clip on a tuner and bring each of the six strings to pitch, always arriving from below. Second, play the progression G, G7, C, D7, G, over and over, slowly. Watch for the banana (curl those fingers) and check for daylight so nothing gets muted. A steady, clean pass beats a fast, buzzy one every time.

Where you are

This is Lesson 01, and it is the whole foundation. Those six string names are exactly standard tuning (E A D G B E), and the guitar you play them on rides on a good set of guitar strings, the thing this whole site is about. See how Michael Angelo Batio built a career on this same square-one patience. Next, Lesson 02: how to hold the guitar, so your hands can actually reach these shapes without fighting you.