How to Play Guitar from the Beginning

  Playing instruments is a great entertainment for many people, especially guitar. Guitar is a quite popular and common instrument around the world which is because it is really easy to get started and also convenient to be carried around. With a guitar, you can play it anytime and everywhere you want. To play guitar from the beginning, there are three steps that can help you save some wasted efforts.

 

  First, you need to have a guitar before playing it. As the saying goes “You cannot make bricks without straw”. Finding and choosing a right guitar for yourself can be very confusing. To simply classify, there are two main types of guitar, which are electric guitars, and acoustic guitars. The differences between them are body sizes, materials of strings, and how they make sounds. However, there is no correct answer for choosing which one is better for beginners since once you have mastered one, you can learn the other with ease because the main music theory is the same. But the most important thing is the correct size of guitar because if you are uncomfortable playing something too large or too small for you then you will have less motivation to pick it up to play. So the best way to pick your first guitar is to go to an instrument store to try it by yourself.    

 

  After having a guitar, you have to know some guitar basics including understanding the picture of chords and tuning the guitar. Take G chord for example, you can see three sets of number on the picture of G chord. The blue one is the position that we should put on the string. The number 1 to 4 means your index finger, middle finger, ring finger and little finger on your left hand. Next is another set of number on the left-hand side of G chord, which means the frets on the guitar neck. And the last set of the number on the upper side of G chord means the order of strings, the numbers 6 to 1 mean the strings from the fattest (top) to the thinnest (bottom) one. After understanding the picture of chords, the last thing you have to do is tuning the guitar. For this step, you should put your guitar tuner on the head stock and rotate the tuning pegs to tune your guitar. From the fattest to the thinnest, the standard order is E, A, D, G, B, and E.

 

  The final step is to start playing guitar. With numerous information in the Internet, you can easily find how to play a pop song or the songs you like in the range of simple chords from the websites or the free tutorials on YouTube. In the beginning, you can choose to play a song which is composed of basic chords. Once you feel comfortable with playing basic chords, you can begin to move on to songs with advanced chords or something more challenging and explore different ways to play your guitar.

 

  Overall, if you want to play guitar well, there are three main steps you can start with. The first step is finding and choosing a right guitar for yourself, and next, you should understand some guitar basics including knowing the picture of chords and tuning the guitar. And finally, you can start playing guitar with songs composed of simple chords; however, practice is the most important thing for a guitar player. Take me as an example, when I want to learn how to play a challenging song, I can’t always play it fluently at the first several times. So, I often need to slow down the speed of the song with YouTube’s function and practice from low speed to the normal speed. That’s what I did for learning new songs. Therefore, don’t be disappointed if you couldn’t play well at the beginning and knowing that everybody needs to practice. You should always keep the passion in mind and remember one thing: practice make perfect.