Air Guitar Basic Technique

Tim Granlund: I am Tim the 'Six String General' Granlund and I am showing you how to air guitar. Right now we are going to talk about the basic technique of air guitar. First let's just picture a guitar. Got the body down here and the string go up there. We have got the narrow part to the neck. So you are going to drape that over here.

Now if you are right handed, the body of the guitar is going to be lower down towards your right hand. If you are left handed, obviously don't want to put that around. The left hand is going to be down here. I am right handed so we are going to do it this way. The neck is where you are going to change what notes are playing.

So your fingers hold down the strings in different positions to change the notes. Higher notes are going to be down here and then when we want to play lower notes, you are going to move your hand up the neck. Down here this right hand is going to do a couple different things. Now sometimes when you are hearing music, you use your single notes being played. So you are just going to be picking at the individual notes.

Now keep in mind, you are going to be doing that and then you are going to be altering those notes up here. So it's a two part process. You got to remember to coordinate the two hands here. So if you are picking the notes, it was going to look a little something like this.

Alright, that's when you are picking your notes. Now sometimes you are just going to hear, this crunchy like -- that's when someone is striking all the strings at one time and then playing some chords. So you got to have some good power chords going and that's going to sound a little something like this.

Alright, there you go. Now you are playing some good old fashioned power chords. Now the next thing you are going to do is sometimes you are going to hear notes that is kind of really stretched out. You can take a little bit of license here. Keep in mind, when you are playing air guitar, the true technical accuracy isn't that important. You want to look like you are playing a guitar and making some notes up here, you are actually hitting the strings down here.

Well you know what, when you are hearing some of these really stretched out notes, there is a couple of difficult ways you can do it. Then if you are really doing it, you will be pulling the whammy bar down here. So you can do it like that, maybe you want to run your hands up and down the strings like that. So I will say it will go like this.

Alright, now we just played some good long stretched out notes and of course, you want to remember too. Now you hear a note, that kind of wobbles up like this -- So remember to kind of tweak the fingers up here to get the notes wobbling. That's basically in a nutshell, how you are going to play your air guitar.

Play the notes down here and change when notes are playing up here. Alright, next we are going to talk about some flair and how you can spice up your performance and make it a little bit crazier and take advantage of the fact that you are playing air guitar.