There's been much time and money spent on learning to play the guitar. It's not as easy as it sounds "playing guitar", there are a bunch of other factors to it than just learning the strings. You have to find the right teacher, make sure that teacher is not abusing on price and learning time, time spent practicing, a guitar with the right scale and ease of playability. One teacher I had, not such a good experience. He basically lectured me for 15 minutes and the other 15 is his eating $%#& time. The only reason why I lasted 2 months was because he was actually a great teacher but it's just the little things that did not make it worth my time and money.
Being self taught at home was the best decision I've ever made in my guitar career. You see, in our day and age we have a little commodity called the Internet and it's meant to be used to the maximum. Information is ran through the Internet by the billions. The best part about it is, we can select an article to learn from which suits our educational needs the best. Youtube has been a place where millions want to be recognized and I believe that guitarists are at the top of that list. You can choose from hundreds of amateur instructors on youtube, rating the better ones to help another aspiring musician as yourself take advantage of these free high quality lessons.
I've listed some locations from youtube where you can learn from scratch "how to play the guitar". We start off with some chord learning, then to the strumming, some fingerpicking, and then we learn some songs to expand our playing techniques. I place the steps from easiest to hardest, I do not recommend skipping the steps if you've never picked up the guitar before. If you know a thing-or-two about playing than you should try to learn the songs as a challenge. The songs are also numerated from easy to hard. You should have plenty to go with here, so, save my blog page to be coming back and keep trying the steps over and over. Each step should take you at least a week to practice, but, the more you practice a step, the less time you'll have to spend learning a song.
The way you hold your guitar from the beginning is mandatory to master before you start to play:
Let's make sure your guitar is well tuned before you begin playing:
Lesson 1: Let's start off by learning some chords
Doing step 1 on your own and without any lectures on strumming or fingerpicking is vital. Once you learn the right way, you learn from your errors and learn a better way to play. Learn as many chords as possible so you will go through less trouble in the future when you want to learn a new song. Make transitions with strumming at first, before you learn to fingerpick and burn in those finger blisters. For some newbies, your fingertips will hurt in the beginning and will peel a couple of times before settling in. Try to practice these notes and chords as much as possible before moving to step 2.
Lesson 2: Strumming and Fingerpicking
These steps can be done with both pick and fingers.
There are many other strumming fingerpicking styles you can learn on youtube. It's easy to find them once you look through these videos. Using the chords you just learned in step one with these strumming and fingerpicking styles can improve your skills dramatically.
These techniques can be used on electric guitars as well. Some of these songs will sound better on electric but many will sound better on acoustic. Try a little of everything, learning different kinds of songs will expand your ability on the guitar.
These are just a small portion of the thousands of videos they have on Youtube for you to learn. As you can tell, I prefer to learn rock songs more than anything else. Just place "How to" then your song of interest on the youtube search bar. If this is not your style of learning than an online teacher or a real teacher may be more suitable for you. The advantage of an online teacher is that you can save the video sessions to return to practice at your leisure and they're not that expensive. Hope this got you started well on the guitar.
