Want to Learn Guitar? Here's What Your Success Depends On
Jan King
The worst mistake anybody wanting to learn guitar can make is to start
off with a guitar that is unplayable.
While it's perfectly understandable to want a cheap beginners guitar,
the wrong guitar can make you want to give up not long after your
first couple of lessons.
There are a couple of things that can be done to prevent making this
mistake, while at the same time still getting an affordable guitar
that's a pleasure to play.
When you go to buy a guitar, take someone with that's already
proficient at playing the guitar, and let them test all the guitars
for playability and potential problems.
Once you've purchased a guitar, take it to a luthier (guitar builder)
or guitar technician to have it set up properly, and possibly have the
frets worked a little to improve its playability.
The quality of beginner guitars has improved over the years, but there
are still some terrible guitars out there.
Beginning with a decent guitar will help you avoid most of the
pitfalls that beginner guitarists come up against, not least of which
is the bad guitar technique which comes from trying to cope with an
unplayable guitar neck.
What will you go through when you learn guitar?
The first thing you'll notice is that your finger tips get very sore.
I'm kind of guessing you already knew that, but in any case, these
sore fingers will start to form blisters which will eventually harden
and become callouses which will act as tiny caps on your fingertips,
and protect your fingers from the strings.
Here are some things you can do to make it a little easier on
yourself.
You could put the lightest possible gauge of strings on your guitar,
as this will mean there's less tension needed to tune your guitar up
to pitch, and so less pressure needed to press the notes and chords.
If you're unable to get hold of a lighter set of guitar strings right
away, you could tune your guitar down by a whole tone while you
practice.
Even with these changes to your guitar, you'll still get blisters, but
it won't be as painful. Blisters are a necessary part of learning how
to play the guitar.
How long will it take to learn guitar?
I would love to tell you that you can learn to play guitar in a couple
of weeks, but unfortunately that's unrealistic.
What's realistic to expect is that you learn your first few guitar
chords and play your first song on the guitar within a week, but how
well you play it is a matter of practice and aptitude.
Everybody is different, and some peoples hands adapt to the guitar a
lot quicker than others. The chances are that you'll still have
blisters within the first week.
A tip for practicing guitar.
There's a right way to practice and a wrong way. The wrong way only
looks like practice.
Here's what I found very useful in helping me to progress on the
guitar. I always practice playing something that is slightly more
difficult for me to play, rather than going over things I can already
play.
You'll find that when you try something your fingers aren't
comfortable with yet, and play it until you get it right, that the
other things you already know how to play will flow easily.
This is why some people only go so far with the guitar and remain at
that level. It may seem quite elementary, but it amazes me how they
don't realize it.
It's 10 percent talent and 90 percent sheer stubborn refusal to quit,
and I even think that 9 of that 10 percent talent can be learned and
practiced.
That's what your ultimate success depends on when you learn guitar.
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