Chords Guide

Like any skill or talent, learning how to play a guitar should be fun and rewarding on many levels for you.  With each measured step of progress you achieve there should be a sense of excitement and accomplishment.

Nobody ever thinks to themselves, “I’d like to spend countless hours plucking repetitive notes and scales” when they think about learning guitar. Instead, they think about how much fun it will be to strum along to their favorite songs, lead campfire sing-a-longs and perhaps even write some songs of their own one day.  Maybe this even describes you?

Fortunately, many modern learn guitar courses have adopted an approach that I have been taking for years in teaching; to start with easy to play contemporary songs that the student will be familiar with and enjoy learning.

In doing this, the student learns the fundamental mechanics of playing the guitar without it seeming like work or learning at all, which encourages them to continue further and ultimately learn to understand the theory behind those mechanics.  That’s the primary benefit to this approach over traditional teaching techniques which focused first on theory.

So, for those of you who have been considering taking up an instrument, and specifically those who wish to learn how to play a guitar, my advice after more than twenty years of providing music lessons is to find a teacher or course that focuses on having fun first, and learning to play songs you know and enjoy right away.  This will not only keep your interest and enthusiasm high, but will also help drive you to learn the fundamental theory behind music scales and chord progressions on your own later.

Tags: how to play a guitar

I’m an advocate for being practical and using what works, often over what’s expected or considered “the norm”; which is why I say that most music programs are not how to learn the guitar in my opinion.

They start with repetitive and often boring focus on the technical, mechanical and theory fundamentals which are very important, but tend to lose the student’s interest in a hurry.

Let’s face it, most kids or even adults who decide they want to learn an instrument aren’t excited over spending countless hours with scales, they’re excited about strumming some strings, playing something close to music and having fun.

And here’s the thing that traditional instruction seems to overlook, when someone is having fun right from the start there’s an increased chance that they’ll stick with the instrument and over time build a desire to go beyond the fun to actually learn to be competent musicians. Why shouldn’t this be the standard model for how to learn the guitar?

This is why I’m such a big fan of teach yourself the guitar courses, because they often start by teaching you how to actually play several familiar and easy to learn guitar tunes within a few hours, which leads to the student having fun as well as feeling successful and encouraged.

Then they build on that sense of accomplishment and progress through learning slightly harder songs in gradual steps.

In a matter of days the student is playing well known and fairly complex songs reasonably well, having fun doing it and typically without realizing it getting a good education in various strands of music theory.

I’ve known a lot of people who used a teach yourself the guitar course and all of them enjoyed the learning process then went on to learn the fundamentals on their own because they wanted to take their “fun playing” to competent playing.

I don’t mean this to sound like an attack on music teachers, I just don’t understand the continued use of methods that encourage as many students to grow bored or give up as they do to succeed and actually learn an instrument.

Just because that’s the way it’s always been done doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be done.

In my opinion, how to learn the guitar is to simply get your hands on a teach yourself the guitar course that seems to actually teach you songs right from the start, and once you complete it decide if learning on your own is working and fun, or if you need traditional lessons to play guitar.