Learning How To Play The Guitar

If you have a good feeling for rhythm. If you can appreciate good tone, have an ear for harmony and tunes using your experience with maybe a keyboard instrument, you will probably take to learning how to play the guitar like a duck to water.

When you start to plan your guitar practice routine, remember that only half an hour a day of practice is all you need in learning how to play the guitar. But it should be focused. You need to have a plan and devote that half an hour to the plan, with no distractions. When you are working on your technique make sure you practice slowly and get into the habit of using a metronome all the time.

There are lots of different ways to learn to play the guitar. You will find people who advise you that you won’t learn to play the guitar unless you learn music theory or that guitar tab is dangerous for your education as a “real” musician, but for all that kind of advice, you will see that plenty of famous guitarists learnt to play by ear and never learnt any theory. That’s not to say learning theory is useless, just that some people are not suited to that side of music.

Where do you want to go with the guitar? A few months working on some picking and strumming techniques and learning some basic chords will turn you into a guitar player who can play almost any song you can name, as long as you have heard it before. You will be a big hit at parties and that’s not to be sneezed at. If you can play popular songs for your audience you have made yourself into a musician.

The thing that tends to bring people down when they are learning how to play the guitar is the constant repetition. Every day you start from where you started yesterday, and for the first few weeks, no progress in your guitar playing is noticeable. But slow repetitive practice pays off whether you are learning the chords for songs or practicing guitar solos involving scales.

Here are some exercises for warming up before starting a guitar practice session . . .

Don’t learn a bunch of songs incompletely. It gives you no satisfaction and will give the audience the feeling that they’d rather be somewhere else. Take the time to learn your material really well. It will give you confidence and your audience will respond favourably to you.

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Guitar How-To

Learning How To Play The Guitar