Now, let’s talk about electric guitars. What I have in my hands here is a pretty typical version of an Electric Guitar. One thing that we saw when we looked at the Acoustic Guitar was how thick the body is. If I turn this on its side, you can see that it’s a lot thinner. The reason is that a lot of these electric guitars are actually just a solid piece of wood, it’s carved out of a block of wood. The result is that, with this thin body, it is going to be a lot easier to get your arm around it. A lot of the times, you’re going to find that the strings are actually thinner than an acoustic guitar, so they are easier to play. It’s going to be easier on your fingertips. So when you are starting out, that can be a big help. If I go to play the electric guitar all by itself [Strumming the chords], there is not much sound coming out of it. So, if you play with other musicians, no one can really hear you. You can practice this way, but there’s a critical piece of equipment that we need, and that is the Amplifier. This is a pretty basic standard amplifier. When you are starting out, you don’t need all the bells and whistles, just something basic to get you going. A lot of times, they call that a “practice amp”. This one has some controls here for the sound, that is the base, mid, and treble controls. I’ve got a master volume, I can plug in headphones. As you can see, my cord is plugged in, and I have some other controls for the Distortion, and those are often called your Gain knobs. Anyway, let’s plug our Guitar in here... Ok. Immediately we can hear there is a lot more sound [Strums the strings]. Let’s talk about some of the controls that I have here [Points to the body of the guitar]. The way the instrument works is that these strings are metal, and these things here are called pickups. Each Pickup has a bunch of magnets in it. Of course, magnets being attracted to metal, the way it works in a very basic sense, is you strike a string, the magnet kind of measures the vibration from the string, and uses the electronics by way of the cord to send it to the amplifier. So those are the pickups. These ones are called Single Coil Pickups, each one is a single coil. They also have something called a double coil pickup, which is commonly known as a Humbucker. A double coil is literally two single coils next to each other. They have a totally different sound, so that is something that you should definitely investigate. Another thing that we can look at here are the controls. I’ve got the volume, and two tone controls. The volume [Strums once] basically shuts the amplifier sound off [Strums few times]. And my tone controls [Strums twice] will change the brightness or the darkness of the sound. I also have the selector switch here. The selector changes between the different pickups. So, the pickup closest to the Bridge [Strums once] is typically the brightest sounding pickup, and then the pickup, for example all the way closest to the neck [Strums once] has a very different, warmer kind of sound. [Strums once] As I switch from pickup to pickup, you can hear the change in the sound [Strums once]. The last thing we can talk about is the Whammy bar. This is a lot of fun. The whammy bar is connected to the bridge, and allows us to do all sorts of fun things. For example [Demonstrates how to use a whammy bar]. I can play with some chords, I can do some stuff with some notes [Plays notes using whammy bar]. So, lot of fun you can have with that. The cool thing about the electric is all of the variety of the sounds that you can get. Let’s listen to some different things here. The current setup I have is the pretty Clean Tone, so this might be good for, you know [Plays blues, jazz style riff].Kind of bluesy, jazzy sounds. Whatever you like. If I play with the knobs here, I can introduce a little bit of distortion, so If I want more like a rock guitar thing [Plays rock style riff]. Or, if we really crank up the distortion, it might be good for some real, heavy kind of guitar [Plays metal style riff]. That is the electric guitar, and as you can hear, it is really diverse sounding instrument, so it is good for lot of different styles of music. But, as we’ve been saying, the most important thing is to get the kind of guitar that you’re excited about. That’s going to help you keep practicing, and keep working hard.