Learning To Play The Guitar

Learning to play a musical instrument of any kind is something lots of people want to do but never get around to, and one of the most popular choices is the guitar.  Did you know that learning to play the guitar is fairly easy if you can learn how a guitar works, and teach yourself how to understand guitar chords and how they are written then there is no reason why you cannot learn how to play guitar fast.

Whether you fancy playing electric guitar or acoustic guitar, you will need to learn in exactly the same way to start with.

Obviously you need to start by getting a guitar to learn on.  Even if you are aiming to play the electric guitar, it maybe cheaper to start with an acoustic guitar as these can be picked up at excellent low prices and are good enough to learn the basics with.  The first step is getting to know your instrument, as to start with holding a guitar is going to feel rather strange and unnatural.  You need to practice holding it as if you were going to play it until it starts to feel more comfortable and natural.

The next step is to learn the notes of each string. There are 6 of them, all of which when playing with other people would need to be tuned, so learning how to tune your guitar is a good step too, as is overall familiarization of your instrument.  Put your guitar face up on your lap so that you can learn the order of the strings.  The one at the bottom, furthest away from you is E – there are two E strings.

This is high E and the string nearest you is low E, and from high E moving towards you the strings are as follows – high E A D G B E (low).

The guitar is played by learning guitar chords, which are created by using your left hand to hold down specific notes, and specific points along the neck which is divided in to frets, and called the fret board.

Written music for a guitar is called a tab, and consists of 6 lines drawn to represent each string.  A number is put on the line and this indicates where on the fret board that string is held – so 2 on the top line means you should be holding the high E at the 2nd fret.  You need to spend time looking at a guitar tab and thinking about how they are written until reading them becomes second nature.

If the numbers are shown side by side, you should be playing a single note at the correct fret one after the other.  When numbers appear stacked one on top of another, you are being shown a chord and you need to hold all strings down as shown at the frets it indicates. By doing this you will create a chord.

It may not be what you want to hear, but there is only one way to get really good at playing the guitar and that is to practice daily where possible, and be disciplined about it.  You are not going to improve straight away and some days everything you do will seem futile, but don’t give up.

You will have bad days where you can’t seem to get anything right, in which case don’t sit there endlessly getting annoyed, leave it alone until much later in the day and then try again.  Choose music that you actually enjoy playing as this is much better for your morale than endlessly fighting to learn to play something you hate listening to.