Guitar Boogie
Learning To Play The Guitar – Advice For Beginners
First off, all these sites that claim you can become a guitar god overnight are telling lies. Don’t expect to be able to rock out like ‘fill in the blank for whoever you want to play like’ the first day you get your guitar. You have got an upward, narrow path ahead with frustration and even pain marking those first steps into becoming a decent player. Having said that, as in all areas of life, results will come if you try, try and try again. Practice, practice, practice. Learning is a plant whose roots are bitter but whose flowers are sweet and all that…
One of the first things you are going to have to do is build up calluses on the fingers of the hand you use on the fretboard. Most people use their left hand for this but don’t worry if you you feel more comfortable using your right; Paul McCartney played this way and he’s done alright. It may even be a sign that your are a right-brained musical genius. Anyway, whichever hand you use on the fretboard, expect blisters and even bleeding to be your reward for those first days of fretting your first chords.
What motivated me to play the guitar was other people’s music, and I wanted to learn to play my favourite songs and solos just like the players I admired. Perhaps I am not alone in terms of this kind of motivation. So, learning to read music and practice scales never really did it for me. I remember how I was made to do this as a child at piano lessons and I soon told my parents I didn’t want to go anymore. Had the teacher showed me some left hand boogie-woogie riffs with her playing over the top, it would have been a different story.
I just wanted to learn to play the songs I loved on the guitar, so I would get video lessons and songbooks or just try to pick out the song by ear from the record. I was motivated because I had the goal of eventually being able to play this cool song I loved. As I say, I never got this motivation from learning to read music and practising scales although I do acknowledge that such knowledge is advantageous.
Anyway, if you are like me (and I suspect you might be) and you are starting out learning the guitar, then you might like my easy guitar songs to play for friends which I have up on my site which has an ever growing collection of easy acoustic guitar songs for the beginner. The video guitar lessons are simple and clear and several song guitar lessons are totally free.
About the Author
http://www.mattsguitarlessons.co.uk
Tommy Emmanuel – Guitar Boogie
