Playing Guitar - Getting Started
Learning to play guitar is to some extent about eye-hand coordination. Ironically, that can be more difficult for anyone who grew up in the post-video games era. In a video game, the action is carried out for you. In playing guitar, you have to carry it out. But there are similarities too. In a video game small finger movements make the action happen. The movements are different, but small guitar fingerings can produce large results.
Learning to do that doesn’t happen overnight - it takes long hours of practice. Except for the truly gifted, it will take a year or more to learn anything beyond the basics. Long before that year is up, you should be able to play basic chords and do basic scales with ease. Those can be learned in a few weeks or months at most, for almost everyone. If that’s the level you’re satisfied with, at least at first, that’s great.
But playing guitar is, in one way, like playing piano. You can learn which keys to press on a piano keyboard and play a few chords. The result will be music. But to learn to play a song, then more, requires long practice. The same is true of guitar.
There are a half-dozen simple chords that will get you started. Many songs are little more than combinations of those. Simple diagrams can show you where to place your fingers, and you’ll become comfortable with that in a few weeks or less. But to really play a song means learning to play individual notes, at the right rhythm and in the right order, without fumbling. To do that, there’s no substitute for practice.
But practice doesn’t have to be torture. Unlike, say, the violin where the sound that comes out is horrendous for a year or more, you can make pleasant sounds quickly. You can soon add to your basic store of simple chords, by learning parts of a few of your favorite riffs. You won’t be Eric Clapton or Eddie Van Halen right away. They spent years practicing to reach that level. But you can enjoy yourself on the way.
Part of the incentive to practice more comes from those small moments of increasing mastery, as you learn more and more. Like any instrument, as you get comfortable with the basics, then move a little beyond, you can begin to put small pieces together into a larger whole. You can move from a chord here and there, to an entire series of chords. You can move from a few notes, to an entire melody.
Set aside time each day, an hour at least, away from distractions. Regular repetition is important learning a new language, and the same principle applies to learning guitar. Your mind needs uninterrupted time to train your finger, hand and arm muscles and vice-versa.
Learn the basic symbols of sheet music. You don’t have to learn everything about music right away, but you’ll save a lot of time if you make an effort to approach it as more than just a random experiment. Getting some guidance from sheet music, diagrams and the like will accelerate your progress ten-fold.