Steps to Learning to Play Guitar

Learning how to play an instrument is one of the greatest things that you can do in life. Research has revealed that musicians tend to be more extroverted, get better results in school, and tend to be more open to the world. The acoustic/electric guitar is a very popular instrument, for this reason lots of people choose to learn to play the guitar, rather than the piano for example.

Easy...

Easy...

Learning to be a guitar player without the help of a live instructor is very possible these days. Back when I learned, we had mainly publications and tapes to learn through. The Internet has actually revolutionized musical instruction, making it easy to learn guitar.

Nowadays, if you decide you want to learn to play electric or acoustic guitar the acoustic or electric guitar (or anything else for that matter), what do you do? Google it! You'll find an overwhelming amount of information, articles, videos and learn guitar products. In actual fact, you will find so much, it can turn out to be a burden, as you may find yourself moving from one resource to another without staying with one system persistently.

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10 Common Beginner Guitar Student Question and Answers

If you've ever contacted me on any guitar related question, you'll know that I answer all of my students' questions personally. I love doing so for people learning from our beginner guitar lessons. There are a lot of typical questions and problems that my online students encounter, so I thought a post on these would be useful for everyone to see.

Guitar Student Q&A

Guitar Student Q&A

Of course, if you have any other questions, get stuck somewhere, or just need a bit of motivation, feel free to contact me any time. But with that said, read through the below list of questions I get asked most often, you'll probably find answers to your problems as well.

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Guitar Tabs Reference Guide

Becoming familiar with guitar tab notation is an important step in becoming a guitarist. If you just want to learn and strum a couple of chords, than you won't need to know how to decipher tablature. BUT if you want to be able to play as many songs as you like, you will definitely need to learn how to read guitar tabs.

Learning tabs is easy!

Learning tabs is easy!

First of all, you need to know that reading tabs is very easy. It may seem complicated at first, but with just a little practice, you'll be able to effectively read guitar tablature, which is great, since you can download loads of tabs off of the Internet, not to mention the fact that our own Guitar Pro tabs database uses tabs as well.

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Easiest way to learn guitar

One of the most common questions I get from my students (both online and offline) is:

Tom, what's the easiest way to learn guitar?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that 🙂

So, my young Padawans, let's have a look at this question in detail.

simple-method-learn-guitarCan learning guitar be easy?

If you are looking for an easy way to learn to play guitar in 10 days, you just got to stop and ask yourself a few things.

  1. Can I really build a complex skill in a week?
  2. And if I could, wouldn't everyone be playing guitar like Slash?

Don't be silly now. There is no pill you take and wake up the next day and become awesome at guitar. Are you looking for a quick and simple way to learn chords, scales, and whatnot? Well, sorry, but there isn't any. You have to work for it, and it will take a while.

Guitar stars like Eric Clapton, Slash, BB King make it look so easy, right. Yeah, but they've been playing for decades. How long have you been playing?

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How to Switch Chords Quickly

All beginner guitarists struggle with switching between chords at first, thats part of the learning curve. Here are some tips on the subject, but make sure you watch our video lesson on how to change between guitar chords, where I will show you the correct technique of learning chord changes. Watch my hands closely to see the correct method.

Practice makes perfect!

Practice makes perfect!

The main reason beginner guitarists experience difficulties when switching between chords quickly doesn't really have that much to do with their fingers. The main problem is that beginners haven't learned to visualize which chord they're about to play, and which fingers they'll need to move. This means that once they get to where they would need to change chords, they start thinking about which finger goes where, which means that there will be a lag between the chord changes.
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Alternate Picking Tips

One of the most important and useful lead guitar technique beginner guitarists must learn at an early stage is alternate picking. Most beginners tend to pick the strings only downwards, which is a bad habit to get used to, and if it's not dealt with right in the beginning, changing to alternate picking will be harder later on.

Alternate picking

Alternate picking for all!

Learning alternate picking will increase playing fluidity and efficiency. The process of picking strings alternately is the process of using a guitar pick to pluck the strings using an alternating pattern of downward and upward plucks, in other words, playing with strictly alternating downward and upward motions. Why is this so beneficial? Because it has a result of minimizing wasted motion, increasing your plucking speed, and ultimately resulting in smoother playing. It allows you to play a series of picked notes fluently and cleanly, and also improves your sense of rhythm.

Many beginners have a hard time learning it at first. As part of our guitar lessons for beginners, here are a couple of useful tips on how to learn alternate picking.

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Best Way to Build Calluses for Guitar

If you're reading this article, your fingertips are probably hurting like crazy right now 🙂

Be comforted by the fact that sore fingertips are part of the initial learning process, all guitarists know the pain and got through it. Actually, after a while, you'll get to like the feeling of soreness in your fingertip, since it'll mean you had a good practice session.

Your newly built calluses won't look yukky or weird at all. 

Keep on reading, I'll show you what they will eventually look like and how to get them to form quickly so you can play guitar 24 hours a day. Read more

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Guitarist Rhythm Troubles – How to Stay on Beat!

Lots of beginner, and even intermediate guitarists have rhythm problems, I did as well.

Actually, guitarists are notoriously known to have no sense of rhythm whatsoever, thats why drummers were created, to help us stay on beat 🙂

The problem is not really that we don't have a sense of rhythm, but I think it has more to do with the fact that by simply missing 1 beat, so for example plucking just 1 or 2 notes off beat, guitarists tend to get totally off beat from there.

I had a guitar teacher that showed me a couple of rhythm developing exercises back when I was learning as well, some of which I can't really show you through a blog post, but here is what you can do to start out:

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Should a guitarist learn standard music notation, or just guitar tablature?

One of my online students just wrote me a letter, asking whether he needs to learn to read standard music notation, or is tablature enough.

...a few guys locally who are in the local music biz and they all tell me that guitar, or any other instrument for that matter, should only be taught with the standard music notation...

This is an interesting question that will probably be asked by most guitar students at one time or another, so I thought it would be worth sharing my answer here:

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Learn Barre Chords by Playing Songs

Time to talk about those "dreaded" barre (bar) chords again. Why? Because many beginner guitarists make the mistake of giving up on barre chords, since they are not that easy to learn. This is one of the biggest mistakes you could make, one that could ultimately lead to quitting the guitar altogether.

Learn those barre chords!

Learn those barre chords!

You see, barre chords are an integral part of playing the guitar. They are used in many genres, many songs, so giving up on them will mean leaving a huge hole in your knowledge, one that you won't be able to fill with any bypass technique. Unfortunately a lot of beginners quit the guitar when they realize this fact. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but thats just the way it is. Don't feel down though, since YOU CAN learn these chords, just like I did, just like BB King did, just like every guitarist who you've ever seen did.

Here is my best advice on how you can learn barre chords.

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