How To Play Guitar For Beginners

So you’ve finally taken the leap and decided that today’s the day you’re going to start to learn how to play guitar – right on!

Acoustic Hands, by redwood 1

Learning how to play guitar will give you an incredibly rewarding skill for life, and once you know how to play, you’ll find that having a guitar is like having good friend and constant companion (I know that sounds cheesy, but it’s true!)

First off, let me tell you that you’ve made a good choice – the guitar is one of the friendliest instruments around, and it’s relatively easy to make fun, satisfying sounds pretty quickly. In fact, you can be playing chords and strumming along to some of your favorite songs within a few days (though your fingers may hurt a little: more on this later).

One of the great things about learning to play guitar today is that there’s never been more educational information available. Here’s the flip side, though: it can be totally overwhelming – how do you even know where to start?

If you’re serious about learning guitar, the most important thing you need to get started, other than an overall love of music and the instrument, is a basic blueprint, or plan – a roadmap for where you want to go. This should be in the form of an incredibly simple list that you can always refer to when you get stuck, or lost, to remind you what you’re trying to do.

Here are the basic steps involved in learning how to play guitar for beginners, boiled down to just the absolute essentials, so it’s not overwhelming:

1. Learn Guitar Chords
2. Learn How To Strum
3. Learn Guitar Songs
4. Learn To Play Guitar Solos

Yup – that’s it. Obviously, there’s going to be more to learn about playing the guitar down the road, but I think that you’ll find that this is plenty to chew on for now. Write these down on a post-it (the best plans all fit on post-its) and stick it somewhere you’ll see it every day.

Learning how to play guitar chords for beginners is the first thing any budding guitarist needs to master. You might have seen other guitar players effortlessly moving their hands around on the guitar neck – without even looking at them! – and perhaps worrried just the tiniest bit about just how the heck they do that.

Am I right?

Well, as you might expect, it is going to take some time and effort on your part. And I’m going to tell you right up front that there’s no way around this part: your fingertips are going to hurt – more than a little, for a couple of weeks – until you develop some calluses.

The good news, though, is that an astonishing number of famous songs, most of them, in fact, are built on a really small handful of chords. Like, six. Seriously, once you’ve learned E, A, G, D, C and F, you’ll be able to play almost any song. For real. Here’s a chart that shows you all of these chords:

(*You might notice that I threw in one impostor chord, B, just to see if you were paying attention.)

Anyway, here are the things you’ll need to know to read the chord diagrams:

• The Xs and Os at the top of each diagram:
  • Xs = strings you don’t play for that chord
  • Os = open strings, where you don’t put a finger on it at all
• The black dots represent your fingers, and the digits beneath each chord diagram tell you which finger you should use to make that dot. Your index finger is 1, middle finger 2, ring finger 3, and pinky is 4
• Now, for the grid that forms the heart of each chord diagram:
  • The vertical lines represent strings on the guitar, with the leftmost string being the low E (it’s also the fattest string), and the rightmost string being the high E (the skinniest string)
  • The horizontal lines represent frets, the silver metal things that divide the guitar neck into segments. In this diagram, the topmost fret is the zero fret, closest to the headstock (that thing with the tuning knobs, that you attach the strings to), and the bottommost fret is the 5th fret, heading down the neck towards the body of the guitar

So basically, all you need to do to play any of these chords is to press the indicated strings down at the indicated frets with the indicated fingers, and then use the fingers of your other hand to strum the strings over the body of the guitar

Like most aspects of music and guitar, though, how to play guitar chords for beginners is much, much better explained through video. I’ve scoured YouTube to find one of the simplest, most straightforward videos to help you learn your first chords. This one won’t win any prizes for flash and special effects; it just does the job –check it out.

Article Source: http://howtoplayguitarforbeginners.net/