Archive for category: Beginner Guitar Lessons

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.

Can 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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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 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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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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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!

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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Cool Rock n Roll guitar lessons

Rock & Roll is not as popular as it used to be, but lots of people still love listening to it. If you're one of them, you'll be happy to know that we have several Rock n Roll guitar lessons on TheGuitarLesson.com, which will have you playing these songs in no time.

Just as a primer, Rock and Roll started developing in the late '40s, early '50s. Initially, the lead instruments were either the piano or saxophone, which was later replaced by the guitar as the lead instrument. True Rock n Roll is played with a lead and a rhythm electric guitar, an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit. And of course, the singer's voice.

Rock and Roll wasn't just about music, it influenced lifestyle, people's attitudes, dance style and fashion as well, set by the most famous Rock & Roll legends, such as: Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, etc.

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