Four Steps To Playing The Guitar

If you know how to play a guitar, you will notice how natural it may seem to pick up a guitar, set it on your lap and start belting out tunes by strumming and plucking the strings. But for the beginner, it's a lot more difficult than doing that.

In fact, there are quite a few steps that a beginner has to go through before even learning how to play a simple birthday song on the guitar. If you are about to embark on a guitar-playing learning frenzy, then know that you should start from step one. Here are the steps that you should take so that you can play a mean tune on your guitar.

• First, know your sound – Are you looking to play an acoustic guitar or an electric guitar? This is actually a very valid question to ask yourself because with an electric guitar, you are capable of playing all sorts of tunes with different effects. An acoustic guitar will probably serve you best because you can learn all the basic skills with just the basic sounds that emanate from the instrument itself.

Knowing the difference between the acoustic and the electric sound is important so make sure you know what sound you want to experiment with and learn. This will help you also to pick out the right instrument for you.

• Second, research chords – Although there are only 6 basic chords when it comes to guitar playing, there are also many variations of those chords so that you can achieve notes in different octaves. Learn the basic chords and get to know them by heart. Practice how to play them on your guitar thoroughly until you are confident that you are ready to move on to more progressive and difficult chord play.

• Third, strum and pluck – The next thing to do is to learn how to strum the chords that you have learned on your guitar. You can also learn some basic string plucking.

Try to perfect what you learn through practice and also learn how to control the volume or the sound of your strumming merely by changing the weight of your hand on the strings. Once you know what kind of sound you will get by the way you hit your strings, then you will be ready to continue on to more advanced learning.

• Fourth, learn a song – It doesn't have to be a really difficult song. A simple song like “Happy Birthday To You” is a perfect way to learn how to dynamically switch between chords and notes. Learn to play the song by strumming and also learn how to play it by plucking the strings.

Remember that you will make a lot of mistakes. But with continued practice, you will soon get the hang of it. Then, you can either start to improvise and add your own style to the song or you can move on to learning a more difficult song that has more notes and more chords that require more difficult transitions.