Chords Guide

Like a lot of kids I begged my parents to let me take music lessons when I was 11 years old, and then I quit them within 3 months. Not because I didn’t still love music or want to play, but because after 10 weeks the teacher still had the class playing simple scales…and I got bored. She didn’t make it fun to learn guitar, easy either.

And that’s how most teachers and instructors have approached teaching music to kids based on everything I’ve experienced and everyone I’ve ever talked to about it. Music instruction has been designed so that you learn the basic building blocks through tedious repetition, and then you get to have fun applying what you’ve literally beaten into your head.

And I’ve always thought that was backwards. Music isn’t just a skill to be drilled into your head, it’s also about being artistic and expressive; and the one thing that music should never be is boring.

But I know that if you can have fun with it right from the start then you’ll make it your mission to learn those basic building blocks for yourself as you progress. Just as it becomes easier to quit lessons when they become boring, it also gets harder to stop playing and learning if you’re enjoying it.

I know that because after I quit my formal music lessons where my teacher had almost cured me of my passion and desire to play music, I convinced my parents to buy me a small book of “easy to play” guitar songs from the local guitar shop and I learned to play every song in that book on my own.

I wasn’t very good, I didn’t understand a lot of the mechanics or theory behind what I was doing, but I was playing songs and having a blast with my beat up 6-string.

Today I’m a thirty-something and I play guitar, bass, piano and keys well enough to sit in with any band. I read and compose music, I still have a burning passion to play every day–and I’ve never taken another formal lesson since quitting when I was 11.

I’ve learned each new instrument, and multiple styles of playing on each instrument–all from teach yourself type courses and I strongly believe that for most people those are they way to go rather than formal lessons with a stuffy teacher.

Teach yourself courses let you go at your own pace and most importantly they’re usually designed so that you can have fun actually playing songs right away–and then take time to learn the basics and technicalities of what you’re doing and why as you go along. In other words they make it fun to learn guitar, easy too since it’s always easier to learn guitar when you’re having fun doing it.

Tags: learn guitar easy