Kids Guitar Lessons - How to Position Your Fingers...

The First Position:
With playing guitar, you will be playing in what is called "positions". This is not a difficult thing to understand once you get the hang of it.

If you look at your guitar, you notice that you have either 12 or 14 frets before the neck joins the body of the guitar. Now all of these frets are not for decoration. They serve a useful purpose.

We can play what musicians call "up the neck". What this means is that you play notes on the upper frets, or in other "positions".

For the first several months or more of your Ultimate Kids Guitar Lessons, you have been playing in what is called the "first position" or the "open first position".

Depending on your guitar, you can play in the first, second, third, and so on up until about the 10th position before you run out of room because you run into the guitar body.

What is a Position?
A position spans from the starting fret (whatever that may be), up to and including 4 additional fret above this starting position.

In other words the 2nd position would start with the 2nd fret and include the 3rd, 4th, 5th and finally the 6th frets. This would be consistent with all of the strings with the exception of the 3rd string, which only goes to the 5th fret.

What Fingers Do I Use?
Basically you utilize the same fingering as in your "open first postion". The real challenge here is that you don't have any open strings. With positions, it is almost always called a "closed position", which means no open strings.

Here are the frets you play and the fingers of your left hand that you would use to play in the "Second Position".

Second Position:
2nd Fret: Played by 1st Finger
3rd Fret: Played by 2nd Finger
4th Fret: Played by 3rd Finger
5th Fret: Played by 4th Finger
6th Fret: Played by 4th Finger - edged upward.
The Third Position would be exactly the same only you shift everything up one fret. This just repeats until you again, run out of room.

The Open First Position:
The First Position is a little bit unique. You can have the First Position "Open" or the First Position "Closed". First Position Open would be as follows:
Open String
1st Fret: Played with 1st Finger
2nd Fret: Played with 2nd Finger
3rd Fret: Played with 3rd Finger
4th Fret: Played with 4th Finger

The First Position Closed:
Here we eliminate the open strings. So you would have:
1st Fret: Played with 1st Finger
2nd Fret: Played with 2nd Finger
3rd Fret: Played with 3rd Finger
4th Fret: Played with 4th Finger
5th Fret: Played with 5th Finger

Confused?
I hope not....If you are, don't worry about it. Just keep reviewing this information and as the lessons start addressing closed positions, up the neck, it will come to you. It always does.

Additional Articles of Interest
Whole Steps and Half Steps

How to Play Chords Efficiently

How To Practice Guitar