How To Play Guitar For Beginners

Guitar can be a confusing instrument to the total beginner. Notes, chords, scales, progressions; all these different terms can overwhelm the guitar novice. It’s okay to feel lost when you first start guitar, but as time goes on and you spend more hands-on time with your guitar, you will soon realize that all these terms will fall into place and you will pick them up bit by bit, learning about each concept as you gain knowledge, understanding, and practice with guitar playing. There are a few things that one needs to understand to get started on the guitar, and they aren’t super complicated concepts or procedures. Without further hesitation, let’s jump head first into the process of how I learned how to play guitar.

Let me be honest with you: if you don’t have you guitar in tune, you’re not going to get very far when it comes to playing songs. Tuning a guitar is simple and straight forward, and with the use of the internet, you don’t need to buy a tuner. Here are the steps to tune a guitar in standard tuning.

Standard tuning is denoted as E-A-D-G-B-e. You can use a website such as http://www.howtotuneaguitar.org/. Once the site is loaded, you can use the tones that are provided by the website to tune your own guitar to. Once the tones of you guitar match those of the website, your guitar is in tune, and you’re ready to start playing.

Now that you understand the tuning of the guitar, you can easily figure out the note that each fret on the guitar represents. As you recall, the guitar is tune E-A-D-G-B-e, and each of those notes signifies what note is played when an open string (meaning that you don’t have your fingers on any of the frets) is picked.

For example, if the top string is strummed without any fingers on the frets, then the note that is being played is an E note. Each fret that goes down the fretboard (towards the tail end of the guitar) represents a half-step up, with the exception of the shift from B to C and E to F. So this means that when you go from an open top string to the first fret you are going from an E note to an F note. When you place your finger on the second fret of the first string, you are now fretting F# note. The next note in the sequence is? G. Good job. The pattern repeats until you go from B to C or once again from E to F.

Take some time to learn the basic guitar chords. This would be A,B,C,D,E,F, and G chords. There are other variations, such as minor and major chords, diminished, 7^th, etc. but those will come with time and practice. To learn the basic chords, you can go to:

http://www.chordbook.com/guitarchords.php

Once you have the basic chords down, you can learn simple songs, or even just strum along and play with chord combinations and see what sounds best to you.

Tablature (or “tabs” as they’re often called) are the easy way to learn a song. In order to learn how to read tabs, you can head over to:

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com

This site houses quite possibly the largest archive of guitar tabs I have seen. They also have a lot of songs written out with chords, so you can put your chord knowledge to test on the site.

Tabs are easy to read. Simply put, tabs are a visual representation of how a song is played on guitar. The lines represent the guitar strings, E (Low E) being on the top, and e (High E) being on the bottom. The numbers then represent the fret number. The higher the number, the higher on the fret board the fret is. For example, a 0 is an open string, and the 12 is the twelfth fret, or the fret that has the two dots on it. Once you get the hang of reading tabs, you will then be able to learn some songs.

Now that you understand how to read tabs, you can learn some songs. I’d recommend starting out with some easy songs, such as the following:

Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit

Black Sabbath – Iron Man

Deep Purple – Smoke On The Water

Any Blink 182 Song

So with a little bit of dedication and practice, you can be well on your way to learning and enjoying playing the guitar! I wish you the best of luck in your guitar playing endeavors! Have fun!