Learning to Play a Guitar – Where to Start

Where do you start learning to play a guitar?  Well, the first step, quite simply is to get a decent guitar.  You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to buy a decent guitar, and I would definitely not recommend that you spend more than a few hundred dollars on your first guitar.  But don’t go too cheap either.  Perhaps the best way to find a good guitar to start with is to find a buddy or an instructor to help you with the process.  I will also write some articles on this site later about different types of guitars that you can use to help you in your research.

Once you get your guitar, one of the first things you need to learn about is tuning.  Guitars can easily get out of tune, especially if the strings are new, so before you start practicing make sure your guitar is in tune.  There is nothing more frustrating and ineffective than learning to play a guitar that is out of tune.  You can learn to tune a guitar manually, which is not difficult, but to be frank, I’d rather get you started on other more important tasks.  The reason I say this is because there are many inexpensive and highly effective electronic tuners out there, so I would highly recommend that you get one to begin with.  Later, in your spare time, if you want to learn how to tune a guitar manually you can do that.

Here is the electronic tuner I use, which works extremely well for me, and you can get from amazon.com by simply clicking on the image below:

The next step I would recommend you do is to get a hold of a chords chart and start learning the open chords.  They are called open chords because you don’t barre them (we will learn more about barre chords later).  The chart below has nice pictures that show you the exact fingering for each chord:

There are fifteen basic open chords that I would recommend you being with.   They are:

• A major
• A seventh
• A minor
• B seventh
• C major
• C seventh
• D major
• D seventh
• D minor
• E major
• E seventh
• E minor
• F major
• G major
• G seventh

Learn these 15 chords well.  Practice your fingering so that you are pressing the right strings in the right fret and strum the guitar to make sure you get a clean sound.  Then start changing from one chord to another so that you can get comfortable changing chords accurately.

Don’t worry about speed at this point.  The most important thing to practice at this stage is accuracy.

Later we will show you how to put these chords together in different sequences (called chord progressions).  Many popular songs use the chords above in different progressions, so once you have these chords nailed, and you can change them in a few different sequences you will be amazed a t how many songs you will be able to play.

Finally, to wrap this “how to get started” article, experiment with different right-hand techniques (assuming you are right handed).  If you are left-handed you are going to make a choice: Either learn to play like right-handed people do, or get a left-handed guitar.  This is a topic for another discussion.

Strum with your fingers, first using only downstrokes, and then using both downstrokes and upstrokes.  Notice how different they sound.  Next, work with a pick to strum or pick strings individually, going up and down the strings.  There is a lot to be discussed regarding right-hand techniques, and frankly a lot of it is much easier to show via video than in written text.   We will talk about this in more detail in future articles, but you may want to explore some of the beginner videos in the menu above.

Well that is it for now.   You now have in your possession all the basic information you need to start learning to play a guitar.