How to play beginner guitar: five things I wish someone had told me

We all start in the same place with how to play beginner guitar. At first you know nothing except that you have a dream. A dream to play guitar. Some of us get lucky and find the way through to fulfilling that dream. Others don’t.

As you set out to learn guitar, there are some things you need to know. Even if sometimes you don’t want to hear them. Let me tell you a few things I wish someone had told me about how to play beginner guitar.

The five things I wish someone had told me when I was starting out:

• Learning guitar is not easy
• You don’t know as much as you think you do
• You know more than you think you do
• How you hold your guitar matters
• How you hold your body matters–a lot
• Not learning other people’s songs is a lazy cop out and it hurts you (bonus #6!)

Learning how to play beginner guitar is simple, but not easy

Maybe you’ve been there. You watch a friend play guitar and it looks so easy and so effortless. You watch her hands intently as she plays to accompany herself singing along.

She’s captivating the whole room. The party now swirls around her. And she’s not even looking at her hands!

You get inspired and then you get frustrated

So you focus on her fingers and you think you realize how easy the concept is. You push a couple of fingers down on a few strings and drag a pick across all of the strings. And magic comes out. How much easier could it be?

So the next day you dust off your old six string and sit down to play. What seemed so easy last night, turns into 20 minutes of plunking around aimlessly, 30 minutes of frustration, and a week of brooding as you once again fail to figure out how to play beginner guitar.

And it’s so blasted easy! You must be hopeless.

Don’t confuse simple with easy

What have you done? You’ve confused the concept of simple with the concept of easy.

The mechanics of playing the guitar are pretty darned simple. Even advanced guitar mechanics are simple. You just:

• push down on a string to make it shorter and change its pitch
• pluck or strum the string to sound the note
• change your finger position and do it again

That’s really all there is to it. You’ve just identified the mechanics of how to play beginner guitar.

But while the mechanical theory is simple to understand, it’s not easy to execute. Certainly not when you’re a beginner.

You need a logical approach to learn how to play beginner guitar

So it takes focused, deliberate effort to learn how to play beginner guitar. It takes a logical approach. And it’s a crap shoot as to whether you’ll develop a logical approach on your own. And if you’ve ever played craps, you know that the house wins more often than you do.

So, I wish someone had told me from the start that learning how to play beginner guitar is not easy. This would have prepared me more adequately mentally for the work I had ahead of me.

It would also have allowed me to not expect so much so fast. And, to cut myself a break now and then when my progress seemed slow.

If you approach how to play beginner guitar thinking it’s going to be easy, you’re likely to fail. It’s not easy. It’s hard and it takes work.

Knowing the difference between simple and easy puts you in position to succeed

But, the good news? Learning how to play beginner guitar might be hard, but it’s not that hard. You can do it. Many people have learned before you. And many will learn after you.

A great place to start is with my free ebook, The Language of Guitar. Then, start learning about the foundations of music with my Understanding the Major Scale is Foundational Music Theory article.

I believe that one component of success involves understanding the difference between simple and easy. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that because the mechanics look simple, it must be easy.

Prepare yourself for the hard work of learning how to play beginner guitar. You will then be in a better position to persevere. And you will soon find your way to success.

How you hold the guitar matters

Here’s a tip I wish someone had given me as I was learning how to play beginner guitar: don’t emulate your favorite rock stars.

Rock stars are not learning how to play beginner guitar

When you watch those guys on stage, you see every manner of horrible form you can imagine. Guitars hanging below their knees. Playing behind their heads. Picking with their teeth.

Yeah, some of that is just showmanship. And why shouldn’t they show off a bit? After all, they’re performers. But man they set bad examples!

Learn to hold your guitar properly

How you hold your guitar matters so much. You simply need to learn proper technique. Especially when you’re first learning how to play beginner guitar.

If your guitar sits at a bad angle to your body…Or if it’s too low and you have to stretch your arms out just to reach it…If you have to hold your wrist at an awkward angle to reach the strings…All of this stuff matters.

If you don’t learn to hold your guitar properly, you might fail to learn to play beginner guitar completely. Or you might learn some basics, but never really progress beyond them to where you long to be.

You can cause serious physical damage with bad form

Worse yet, you might end up hurting yourself. I know it sounds crazy, but you most certainly can cause injuries from playing guitar with bad form. Playing guitar is not on par with the physical exertion of conquering the Iron Man triathlon, but it is nonetheless a physical activity.

And just like other physical activities, doing it with bad form can cause painful and potentially permanent injury.

So, the simple lesson for you: learn proper form. Hold your guitar properly while you’re learning. You can save the crazy stuff for when you’re on stage later. Just make sure you have good dental coverage.

How you hold your body matters…a lot

If how you hold your guitar matters, then how you hold your body matters a lot. And actually, as I hinted at above, the two are closely related.

Your mother might have seemed like a bit of a nag, but she was right. You will never regret good posture. It’s easy to think that playing guitar is just about your fingers, but nothing could be more wrong.

When you’re first learning how to play beginner guitar, you will have a tendency to slouch badly. Shoulders dropping, neck in an unhealthy forward head position as you crane to watch your fingers. Back hunched over. You’re forearms will tense up. The upper arms will begin to ache. Your shoulders will fill with tension.

And you won’t be aware of any of it. Until after you’ve spent two hours wood shedding in that unhealthy position. Then you’ll walk away with a sore neck, sore shoulders, and a sore lower back.

And worse, you won’t make the connection as to why. Since you won’t know why, you’ll do it all again tomorrow. And you’ll do it again the next day. Until finally, your body hurts so much that you won’t want to do anything, let alone play guitar.

And, that’s not all the harm bad posture will do. With bad posture you abuse your joints and muscles. You tense up terribly. And tense, abused muscles do not lead to quality playing and learning.

If you really want to get serious as you set out to learn how to play beginner guitar, then also get serious about learning everything you can about good guitar-playing posture.

Slash can get away with it. He’s a star. But I hope he doesn’t come to regret his decisions as he ages. You? Please avoid the whole gamble and learn good posture from the outset!

You don’t know as much as you think you do about how to play beginner guitar

This one’s simple. You learn a few things and you start to feel pretty smug. It’s natural. But you have so very much still to learn! I’m not picking on you. We all have so much to learn. Playing guitar is a never-ending journey of continuous learning. That’s what makes it such a wonderful pursuit.

So don’t act like you know it all. Because you don’t. And you never will. Listen to more-experienced players. They’ve been there and they know more than you do.

And listen to less-experienced players. They have open minds and long to soak up information, so they may have learned something that you haven’t.

You can learn from every player you meet. You can learn from what they do right. And you can learn from what they do wrong. Keep an open mind, because you don’t know as much as you think you do. Keep learning.

You know more than you think you do about how to play beginner guitar

And here’s the other side of that coin…don’t be so hard on yourself. Yes, it’s true; you have so much to learn. But stop every once in a while and look at what you already know.

Every time you pick up the guitar you stand to learn something new. And pretty soon, you’ll find that you actually know quite a bit.

So don’t sell yourself short. Give yourself credit for what you know and what you can do. If you set out to learn how to play beginner guitar, and today you’re a step closer than you were yesterday, then you owe no one any apologies.

Don’t let yourself be ashamed by a more advanced player. Because they were once where you are. And besides, any player who puts you down for not having the chops he has doesn’t rate your respect. He’s just kind of a jerk, to be blunt. You don’t need people like that along on your journey.

Find players who respect your level no matter how it compares to their own. You deserve that respect. And players who truly embrace the brotherhood/sisterhood of guitar players are all too happy to praise you for what you can do. Surround yourself with those people.

Give yourself credit for what you already know, and move on toward what you will learn today.

Not learning other people’s songs is a lazy cop out that hurts you

OK; this is number six, so it’s a bonus, I guess. But this one hits too close to home to skip. Early on I convinced myself that I didn’t have a natural ear for music. I just couldn’t learn other peoples songs just by listening to them, so why bother trying?

What your heroes say isn’t always the best for learning how to play beginner guitar

Then I heard a rock and roll hero of mine (who shall remain nameless) say something to the effect of, “I couldn’t figure out other people’s songs, so I wrote my own.”

That was it for me. Game over. I wasn’t going to bother trying to learn songs others wrote because I was no good at it anyway. Instead, I’d write my own songs like my hero.

Well, this had both good and bad consequences for me. I did indeed become a pretty prolific song writer, and I’m so glad for my ability to do that. But for years—even after I’d moved beyond how to play beginner guitar—I still never learned how to figure a song out by ear. And that hurt me in so many ways.

You learn so much more than the song when you learn from others

What you learn when you learn someone else’s song goes way, way beyond the song. You learn musical ideas. The structure of music begins to seep into your soul. You gain understanding innately.

It might not seem to matter if you don’t learn some cool song. But it’s more than the song you didn’t learn. You didn’t learn technique. And you didn’t learn chord structure. You also didn’t learn innovative progressions.

And worst of all? If you don’t start working on this as soon as possible in your journey to learn how to play beginner guitar, you stunt your own growth. Don’t wake up one day 30 years later to hear yourself say, “I can’t learn other people’s songs by ear. I just wasn’t born with that skill.”

Guess what? Few people have that skill as a gift of birth. They develop it because they try. And they work hard at it. They convince themselves that’s what they have to do, and they learn how to do it.

And that’s exactly what you’ll have to do. Convince yourself that you can do it. Then set out to accomplish it. You will be thankful that you made the effort.

Conclusion

I think I’ve just touched the tip of the things I wish someone would have told me about learning how to play beginner guitar. But it will help you to understand these things.

You need to know that learning guitar is not easy, no matter how simple the mechanics. But you can do it.

You also need to know that you don’t know as much as you think you do, but at the same time you know more than you think you do.

The importance of holding the guitar properly and good posture can’t be overstated.

And the skill of learning songs by ear seems elusive to most of us. But you have to break through and develop that skill so that you can learn from others.