When you take your first country guitar lesson, you'll start off with the basics - scales, rhythms, and progressions. You'll need to learn the major chords, minor chords, and maybe some 7th chords. Music sheets or tabs tend to have more simple versions of popular songs. Generally, in country music, you'll first learn five chords: C, D, G, E and A. But that's okay, because you can have a lot of fun with just those.

However, once you get a little better, you're going to start learning country guitar licks and phrases, which are individual notes you pick and vary by note, sequence, speed, key...and that special sauce called your playing style.

Country guitar has some of the same styles as rock and blues, but there are differences. For example, country guitar styles don't use electronic distortion much. Country guitar players also prefer a clean sound, rather than the heavy electronic that sound rock bands like Van Halen or Linkin Park uses.

But before we can get deep into styles, you'll need to master some basic techniques. So, what are the country guitar playing techniques?

Strumming is where you simply drag your fingers, fingernails or pick across all the strings in the chord. You can strum up or down, depending on the sound you want to create. Beginners, and even some intermediate players, often make two mistakes when they strum.

First, they strum strings that are NOT in the chord, like strumming the low E and A strings in a D major chord. This obviously creates an almost intolerable sound, so don't do it.

Second, they strum too hard. I've seen many players simply hammer their strums which is just not necessary. If you're playing with any kind of electronic pick up, either on an acoustic or electric guitar, you need to strum more gently. You're not trying to break the guitar, you're trying to pull notes out of the strings. The amplification will pick up the volume. Sure, you can vary it, but don't strum too loud. It will lead to buzz as the vibrating strings hit the fretboard. It will also lead to a heavier sound because, in a down stroke, you'll hit the low notes harder than the high notes.

Picking is where you strike an individual string, with either just your playing hand or your fret hand, or both. Depends on the technique you're using. There two main kinds of picking you should learn in your country guitar lesson: fingerpicking and flatpicking.

Fingerpicking is a where you use your fingers to hit an individual string. When I was first learning guitar, my teacher told me to eat lots of Jello, in order to build up my fingernails so I could pick better. I never knew if it worked, but I did grow the fingernails on my right (playing) hand for a better sound. Fingerpicking is useful for arpeggios, where you play each note (string) of a chord in some sequence. So, for a D major chord, instead of strumming across all four strings, and hearing all strings at the same time, you would pluck each string individually in some pattern - often in a straight sequence. This pulls out each note, for a different sound.

Flatpicking is where you use a pick to pluck the string. Many, many country players use flatpicking. In fact, the technique has been around since the 1920s and continues to developed by players like David Grier and Chris Eldridge of The Punch Brothers. There are different kinds of flatpicking to know about, so here's a brief introduction to them.

In the next article, I'll go over the more popular flatpicking techniques that your country guitar lesson should teach you. Some are easier to learn than others, but once you master these, you can then move on to the more fun process of creating your very own playing style.

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