Ricky Sharples asked:


Now you have your guitar and you have found that if you are going to get any music coming out of it, you will be needing some basic guitar lessons – sooner rather than later. But you do not want to go signing up with a guitar teacher or buying a packaged course on the internet without having some idea of what’s in a guitar lesson, so here is a general overview.

The very basic thing you need in your first guitar lesson is to learn how to hold your guitar. Playing the guitar is a physically demanding activity and if you do not learn to hold your guitar properly you could be making your guitar practice a dreary and painful routine. You also need to learn the basics of how to hold your plectrum and how to strum the guitar.

Any guitar course is structured to teach you how to read some form of written musical notation, either tablature or sheet music. Tablature, or tab, is based on a picture of the guitar neck with the frets you have to finger to get the appropriate notes marked on it. It takes a few minutes to get the basic idea behind tab and maybe half an hour’s playing around to make sure you have got the principle well enough to start reading tabs for your favorite songs.

Sheet music is the conventional music notation that has been around for hundreds of years and is used for all musical instruments. The advantage with sheet music is that you can pick up any piece of music written for any instrument and pick out at least the basic melody on the guitar. The downside of sheet music is that it takes a little time and effort to learn because it entails learning some musical theory. If you are anxious to start playing your guitar real quick you probably think learning music is a bad idea, and many guitarists will tell you they do not miss knowing musical notation. But at the same time alot of guitarists will tell you that they are glad they took the little extra time and effort to learn theory and sheet music.

Basic guitar lessons are all about playing chords. Chords are written in the form of chord charts which tell you where to put your fingers to play the notes, and which strings are included in the chord. Some chord charts even tell you which fingers to use to fret the chord’s notes. Chords can also be written in tabs or in sheet music notes. If you want to play accompaniment for songs, you will probably only need to learn your basic chords and how they relate to each other. This info will enable you to get together a collection of chords which will let you play thousands of songs. You will also learn about chord progressions which is how chords interact with each other in songs.

So that is it. The guitar is a chord-oriented instrument and if you are taught chords and how to read them, that gives you the basic lesson content for the guitar. Of course, the guitar has alot more to offer than just basic chord playing but once you learn chords and strumming you can decide where you want to go from there.



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Ricky Sharples asked:


The easy way to learn guitar chords is to pick out which chords you want to learn and practice them every day. Most guitar students have the constant question in their minds of “when am I going to be a guitarist instead of newbie?” It is natural to be looking for a result, to know that the trip uphill is finally over, but that is not really the way it happens. If you practice a minimum of three chords every day, you get the ability to play as part of a gradual process. Yes, you will find yourself playing songs and making fast chord changes one day but how well you are playing your chords depends on how you practiced on all the days leading up to your emergence as a guitar player.

In practicing guitar chords there is no yesterday. You start off your practice session today as if you know nothing about guitar chords. Every day when you begin your practice you will need to find out where you are with your chords. Let your fingers find where they need to go on the guitar fretboard at their own pace. You see, when you finished up your guitar practice yesterday your hands were warmed up. When you start practicing today, you remember how good your chord changes were yesterday and you try to play too fast. The fast chord changes WILL come but only after SLOW practice.

So is there anything to make learning guitar chords easy? Yes. You can learn guitar chords alot faster if you have chord charts for a few songs that you really like. This way you know which chords you need to learn, and trying the chord changes in your songs will help you to know where you are in your progress as a guitar player. You can use the notes you find in your chords to try to find the guitar solo in your songs, or to make up your own. You can start practicing bar chords by looking up the bar chord shapes for the chords you have already been practicing. You will see how different your songs sound when you make use of bar chords.

You might also be interested in learning to play, or at least get to know, the many variations there are in all chord shapes. Any major chord can be played around a dozen different ways. You do not have to learn them all off by heart but you can look them up in your chord charts and play them through to see how different they all sound.

Another thing that will help you on your way as you learn guitar chords is by finding your favorite chord. Mine was E minor – a two finger chord that sounded great in “I’m Only Sleeping” by The Beatles. Playing that chord helped me remember why I wanted to learn to play guitar. For some guitar players their favorite chord is D minor because of its ability to evoke emotions. Some people like their guitar chords in alternate tunings like Double Dropped D – D A D G B D.



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