Ricky Sharples asked:


The age-old question, “how long does it take to learn guitar?”. It’s natural when starting on a course of learning to ask how long it will take. If you are starting to learn guitar you will be undergoing some changes in the way you spend your time, the way your muscles feel and the way you feel about learning how to play guitar. Right at the start of the course the boring and painful bits are making themselves felt and the rewards are not appearing yet. So how long does it take?

To some degree it depends on how old you are when you start to learn guitar. If you start in your late teens, as many people do, it could take some weeks before you are able to play a few chords and begin to play some easy guitar-accompanied songs. At this age you will possibly have friends who can help you with guitar tips if you don’t actually have a teacher. Once you are over the first hump of learning chords you will start to feel that you are developing your own individual understanding of the guitar.

Some people will learn guitar at music school for a couple of years. This will mean taking the guitar a little more seriously and learning a great number of chords and some music theory. You will be learning the guitar from books and DVDs, maybe augmented by some online guitar lessons. You will realize that the guitar is a fairly difficult instrument to learn if you are planning on really mastering it. Playing a few chords for some easy songs is okay but it could take years to get your head around reading sheet music and understanding guitar music theory.

You could speed up your progress by taking advantage f the enormous number of guitar lesson videos and written tutorials available on line. But no matter how much help you have your progress is not going to be rapid. There’s no magic bullet, you will learn guitar at your own pace, whatever that happens to be.

Some people concentrate on learning the notes on the guitar fretboard – where all the notes are located. If you use this approach you could stick with learning where all the natural notes are because once you know those, the sharps and flats will be obvious. Once you have an understanding of the major and minor scales and how their intervals work, you should be able to play in all keys.

You will also learn about barre chords. This is a technically demanding part of your quest to learn guitar and many people tend to shy away from it, but once you get the idea of the basic chord shapes that you can move up and down the fretboard, it will not be so daunting.

For many, many guitar players the minor pentatonic scale is the beginning, middle and end of learning guitar. If you know the root note of your song or chord you can match it with a minor pentatonic scale. So you are using five notes to compose and improvise guitar solos. What this means is that inside of a year you should have a reasonable mastery of the guitar and the question of how long does it take to learn guitar has changed for you because you know that every time you play you learn something new.



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Ricky Sharples asked:


Some people say it is difficult to learn guitar, others say it really isn’t that hard. The ones who say that it isn’t hard are the ones who have actually learned to play. They have chosen the style they want to learn and have disciplined themselves to set aside a part of every day to practice. They have learnt to read sheet music or tab and they have found out about the rewards of playing music for themselves and for their friends.

Go out and buy yourself an acoustic guitar, download some chord charts and guitar tabs from the internet, get yourself a guitar tuner, and try teaching yourself. That’s the beginning, seeing what you can learn. The advantage of learning the guitar by yourself is that you are very rarely by yourself for very long. There is always somebody who has learned a little bit of guitar themselves and who is ready to share their wisdom with you.

If you decide to learn from videos available on the internet you will be learning from a great variety of guitar teachers. You are benefiting from the experience of guitarists from all over the world you would otherwise never have known about. If you are able to devote the time to practicing what you learned from these videos your progress as a guitar player will be quite rapid.

If you begin to learn the guitar you will learn about callouses on the fingertips, about the need to keep your guitar in tune at all times, and about how you need to take your friends’ advice with a grain of salt. You could try taking some lessons with a guitar teacher. If you can afford that, you will always gain something from the experience, even if the teacher isn’t much good. Or you could keep teaching yourself, making use of guitar tutors that you can buy at your local music store the free guitar lessons on video that you can view on the internet.

Learning the guitar by yourself is one of many ways and the big thing that is missing is structure. It is very difficult for one person to set himself a disciplined practice regime. So along with learning guitar technique and music, your progress as a guitarist will also include self-motivation and making use of reality checks where ever you can find them.

So if you get yourself a nylon string guitar, learn some chords and some strumming patterns, you’ll be off to a good start. From there you can branch out to learning solos or riffs or fingerpicking.



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