Ricky Sharples

How To Play Guitar

If you want to learn how to play guitar picking a favorite song to study is a good way to start. But sidestepping the theory and getting right to playing songs will not eliminate the hard work entirely.

If you are determined to learn how to play guitar then the tutorials that are available online will be quite adequate to start you off playing a song or two. You might even want to learn to play a song before learning any chords or theory. If you give some attention to a song, getting the feel of it, and then start to learn the chords or the melody you will find that trying to learn how to play guitar one song at a time will work quite nicely.

YouTube has a vast collection of video clips showing you how to play guitar and many of these feature detailed instruction on playing individual songs by artists like Greenday, The Beatles, The Eagles or Tom Petty, to name a few. If you want to branch out, you can learn guitar pieces from other genres like folk or classical or country.

What the videos on YouTube can't teach you is how to physically relate to your guitar. When you first pick up the instrument it will feel very strange resting in your hands with so much musical potential waiting for you to learn how to unlock it. The first thing you need to do is relax. If you are right handed, the body of the guitar should be sitting on your right leg. Make a fist of your right hand and then relax it without straightening out the fingers.

Your left hand, also should be relaxed even though it will be called on to exert quite a bit of pressure. Your left thumb should be on the back of the guitar neck more or less crossing it at a right angle. In this position your left fingers should be lining up parallel to the fretboard.

When you first try to play notes or chords, don't be discouraged if you are not producing clean, musical sounds. This is nothing to worry about, just keep trying. You need to angle your fingers so that they do not touch the strings that they are not pressing on. At the beginning of learning how to play guitar, this will be an ongoing job. Every time you learn a new scale or chord, your fingers will need to be disciplined all over again. But as with all new skills, playing the guitar will very quickly become second nature.

So even if you think that you are taking a short cut by learning how to play songs on the guitar without learning any theoretical stuff, your main work will involve training your body. This could put a damper on your enthusiasm if you thought you were going to be playing a song on day one as a guitarist, but if you reset your goals to tackle this painstaking finger training, you will be playing a song in a very short time. And not only that, you will have acquired the skills to go on and learn your next song faster.

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