Learn to Play Guitar

Getting Started To Play Guitar - A Beginner Lesson by Henre Lobus

The Dilemma

If you are just beginning to learn playing the guitar, you are bombarded with many guitar lessons especially nowadays where so much are available online. This becomes a dilemma for those starting out to play the guitar. They just do not know where to start!

How to Start?

When I began to play the guitar during my elementary years I did not start to learn forming chords rightaway. Not even the easiest ones. The simple reasons of having short fingers those times had me tinkling only the strings note for note. The melody of "Happy Birthday" song was the first one I ever played on. I started to learn open chords like D,A,G as soon as I was able to reach the fretboard with my fingers.

Moving forward

Having a guitar chord chart will fast track the process of learning chords. Just start with the open chords C,A,G,E,D and move on to study barre chords like F,Bb,Eb and more. Barre chords need your index finger to hold the strings down across the fretboard. This is the reason why these chords are a little difficult to learn.

When you buy a song book, choose among the ones with accompanying guitar chord chart. Practice a lot of songs with open chords then move further to more complex ones. The song entitled "Horse With No Name" by America is a good start cause it is played with only two chords. Remember, the ingredient to success in playing guitar is perseverance and patience. Most of the guitar teachers will tell you the same words.

Essentially, you should learn how to read guitar tabs. It's a musical notation meant to help guitar players in transcribing any song. Hence, as a beginner you should also learn how to strum a guitar. Moreover, it pays to watch how other guitar players form chords. Luckily, this is much available online.

Conclusion

The accessibility of lessons through internet makes it easier to aspiring guitar players to learn fast unlike the older days where you need to watch a gig just to learn fundamentals and some techniques. The vast majority of lessons are confusing to beginners. Fortunately, what I told you worked for me and there's no reason why it won't work for you as well.

About the Author

Henre Lobus has been playing guitar for over 15 years. He now writes articles for GuitarReference.com a source of free guitar lessons online