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How Should I Approach Beginning Guitar Lessons

How Should I Approach Beginning Guitar Lessons

When I was a teenager, I always wanted to learn how to play the guitar like my favorite rock stars. I loved listening to the guitar solos of Jimi Hendrix, Curt Cobain, and Eric Clapton. Like most people, I looked in the phone book (this was pre-internet!) and found a guitarist offering beginning guitar lessons. I excitedly signed up, and began to learn. The first song I learned was "Come As You Are" by Nirvana, and boy was I excited to play it for my friends.

About twice per week I would head to the guitar studio and play for an hour or two. At first, this was great, but soon my progress came to a standstill. I found that this method of learning guitar just wasn't going to work for me. It just wasn't fun anymore. I told this to one of my friends who was a pretty good guitarist, and he gave me some priceless advice.

He said that if I was serious about playing the guitar well, then I needed to stop throwing away money on expensive weekly lessons and tutorials that only teach the basics. He said that if there is any one thing that any beginning, intermediate, or advanced guitar player needed to focus on, it was practice. He told me to practice a lot, and pick up new information in bite-sized increments as I felt I could handle them so that I could always be constantly improving.

Since I was really motivated to learn guitar, I decided that I had nothing to lose by testing out his advice. I dropped my guitar teacher and began practicing at home. I would learn a technique, master it, and then try to incorporate a new skill as soon as I felt ready for it. Little by little, I began improving again. I owe a lot of my current success to the few simple pieces of advice that my friend gave me that day.

I realized that guitar isn't something that anyone can learn over night. The truth was that the fastest way to learn guitar is to focus on the long-term results. It can sometimes be frustrating to play on demand in front of an instructor, but learning in this way actually made it fun again.

By practicing every day, and learning in small manageable chunks, it wasn't long before I could play hundreds of songs. Eventually, I could even play songs by ear: I could listen to a song on the radio, pick up my guitar and play it back. I started playing at parties and entertaining my friends and family at social gatherings, and eventually I started my first band.

If I could give any advice to someone on their own journey to learn this wonderful instrument, I would remind the to have fun. That's what it's all about after all! It's not supposed to be a job. It may seem counter-intuitive that learning at your own pace in small steps is actually the fastest way to become an excellent guitar player.