Play the Guitar: How to Get Started Playing the Guitar

When I began to play the guitar, I learned things the hard way, trying to play chords right away. Yet my fingers just couldn't find the right position to make the guitar sound good. I was frustrated, even though I wanted to play the guitar well.

I bought my first guitar in 1989. But it's only been in the past five years that I've really focused on playing the guitar well. And now, I'm pretty good. I can jam with good musicians and I can sit down and entertain myself for hours with my guitar.

Today, I'd rather play guitar than watch TV. Think about it this way, at the end of an hour of TV, I'm relaxed and I've wasted an hour. After an hour of playing guitar, I'm relaxed and I'm a better guitar player.

TAKE A DIFFERENT APPROACH

But how I got to where I can play today was very different from the way most guitar teachers teach guitar. Most guitar students start out with a cheap acoustic guitar and immediately try to play chords.

The problem is that cheap acoustic guitars are very hard to play for a first time guitarist. The strings are too big. The neck is too fat. Your fingers are too weak to push down the strings hard enough to get a good sound. Let's face it, most beginner guitar players have a cheap acoustic guitar stashed somewhere in the house. And that cheap guitar is holding them back from being a guitar player.

This means that a cheap acoustic guitar is the wrong way to start playing guitar. I suggest you take a different approach.

START WITH ELECTRIC GUITAR

What I learned is it's better to start out with a decent electric guitar. This will get you started playing comfortably quickly and inspire you to keep playing until you get to the point where you're pretty good-good enough to play with other musicians.

I suggest that you go to a guitar store, like Guitar Center and buy a used guitar for about $300. That's the price point where you get a decent guitar that you can play as a beginner and sound good immediately. A good guitar shop will make sure the guitar set up so that it plays well. I suggest you skip the "starter pack guitars" because they're not good enough that you can play well as a beginner. Getting a used guitar for about $300 will get you a better quality guitar than you can buy new.

Most people choose acoustic guitars because they don't need an amplifier to play. With electric guitars requiring a guitar amplifier to hear which are playing about doubles the cost of getting started. The problem is that cheap guitar amplifiers sound awful.

That's all changed today because you can plug your electric guitar into your iPhone, your iTouch, or your iPad and get thousands of dollars worth of guitar effects for $30 (more on this in another article). You'd pay more than that for a cheap guitar tuner for your acoustic guitar. Just plug in your headphones and you'll sound like you're in front of the stack of Marshall amplifiers.

LOSE THE CHORDS

Instead of starting off trying to play chords, get your hands strong. You need to strengthen your hands by just playing scales. I know, that sounds boring! Yet if you are willing to sit down with your guitar for 15 minutes a day and teach your fingers how to move, in two weeks you'll get enough strength and control to easily make guitar chords. If you don't do this, you're going to be frustrated and stop playing the guitar. Consider this to be "paying the dues" to play guitar.

STRENGTHEN YOUR FINGERS

You don't have to play real scales, all you have to do is exercise your fingers to make them stronger and respond to your mental commands. So start off at the neck of the guitar and the biggest string, and pick and fret (push down the string with your finger, but only hard enough to get a clean sound) and cycle through from your index finger to your middle finger to your ring finger to your pinky, and reverse that. Go slowly, making sure that you have a nice clean tone for each string.

Then move to the next string, and repeat. Do this for 10 or 15 minutes every day, or for 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes in the evening. Over two weeks your fingers will gain strength and you'll increase the dexterity so your brain will know how to move each finger. Now you start form chords. (More on that in another article.)

I learned an awful lot from a downloaded course that I could watch on my computer. It cost less than an hour with a private instructor. I suggest that you check it out. http://playtheguitar.biz

Look for other articles where I share ideas on how to get started playing the guitar quickly.

Mark S A Smith is passionate about playing the guitar and he loves to teach people how to get started playing guitar music fast.