Teach Yourself to Play Guitar

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By hotcubed

There is something about guitar that makes people want to play it. I'm a student at university and it's not uncommon for me to overhear friends and others says something like, "Man, if I could play guitar--it's such a cool instrument."

The draw to learn how to play guitar is there. But do you have what it takes to teach yourself to play guitar? You should know a few things if you're interested in learning.

1.) When you teach yourself to play guitar, it ain't easy. You might know someone who just picked up a guitar and started learning on their own time. They might seem like Dave Matthews to you. But the frank truth is that it takes a lot of time and energy to learn how to play the guitar well. It takes devotion!

2.) When you teach yourself to play guitar, it requires patience and determination. When you first start to play guitar, there are going to be a few obstacles. One of which is that your fingers are going to start to hurt really bad! You'll also probably offend all of those who overhear you practicing, so you'll need to keep a safe distance from your roommate, spouse, friends, etc.

3.) You can't teach yourself to play guitar alone. Every good guitar play has a mentor or instructor--someone to be inspired by or pushed by to succeed. This might be your favorite music artist, or this might be a friend. All to say, if you want to be a good guitar player, you are going to need to be around people in your life who can teach you, give you tips, and lessons.

Do You Think You Have What It Takes?

After reading these couple things, are you still up for the challenge to teach yourself to play guitar? There are a lot of great resources online that can help you. A great place to start is at teach yourself guitar.

Best of luck to you!

The Truth About Online Guitar Lessons

Things I Should I Have Known Before Learning Guitar

Do you wish to learn how to play guitar? There are many important matters which happen to be essential for the beginner guitar player to think about. The online world has a a wide variety of resources on how to master guitar, and that's excellent, however it's pretty easy to get lost in this these resources and squander your energy and time.

First and foremost, you have to recognize that if you wish to teach yourself guitar, you have to be prepared to give it a large amount of effort and self-discipline. Educating yourself on guitar needs a lot of dedication on your part. They say you will need ten thousand hours to truly master something. Just in case you had any dreams of understanding how to play guitar overnight, then you need to leave those at the door. This is not to discourage you, however, you really need to be prepared to be serious to take charge of your teaching yourself guitar.

There are plenty of very good online guitar lesson courses out there, however, there are only a couple which I would have to say are any good. Ultimately, you need to look for a program that doesn't just have written learning material, but also uses audio and video examples. A good quality online guitar lesson course is going to have some type of program which provides you a plan to learn to play guitar.

It is true that you can uncover some free guitar lessons online, but these types of free courses are inclined to lack the organization that's critical to have while you learn guitar. The nice thing about paying for a good online guitar course is you have everything you must have to teach yourself guitar right on hand.

Don't be surprised to shell out approximately forty-seven dollars to get a good quality guitar lesson course. Certain video lesson methods call for a bill every month of around twenty dollars to have entry to their online members area. Do not let the price discourage you because if you take private guitar lessons a couple times a month, you can very well be having to pay just as much as twenty to thirty dollars for only a half hour private guitar lesson. Figure out the math and you will discover that learning how to play guitar with online guitar lessons is not a bad route to take.

I figured out how to play guitar around ten years ago largely by viewing any video tutorials I was able to come across online. This was before the era of Youtube, so as you might be thinking, it was difficult to find quality videos. Back then, there weren't really any online guitar lesson courses. Only if I had what's currently available to learn guitar!

What you want to do is get a program and wholly immerse yourself in it. Just do something. Find any instruction you could possibly discover. Take notes from anyone who is willing to instruct you.

Be ready to expend some time. If you decide to teach yourself guitar, it is critical you make some form of practice schedule and detail out particular skills and techniques to work on. These things probably are chords, scales, or certain songs. The thought is to set up some structure. If you ever take private guitar lessons, your teacher would provide you this structure, but when you teach yourself guitar, you'll have to take charge for making it.

Whenever you routinely devote practice time, you will find that your guitar skills will improve every day. So what on earth do you think you're waiting for? Start learning guitar now!

Comments

GnossoS profile image

GnossoS 3 years ago

I've been messing around with guitar for about a year now, still can't really play because you're right: it really does take A LOT of patience, devotion, and motivation.

My mentor is an insane metal guitarist, and to get that good he tells me he pretty much did nothing but play guitar for months. To this day he plays a couple times every single day. I love music, but sometimes it's hard to get motivated to pick up my Lotus, especially when I'm discouraged about my crappy playing.

When learning guitar, it doesn't take long to realize that unless you're a prodigy, the only way you'll ever get good is if you play constantly. Play while you watch TV, play while you're waiting for a friend, play when you're bored. Just play.

hotcubed profile image

hotcubed Hub Author 3 years ago

GnossoS - Those are great ideas you added. I find it helpful to have a guitar out on the stand next to my desk so I can just pick it up and fiddle around with it. This eliminates all the "work" needed to get out of the case. hah, aren't we lazy sometimes?

Something I would add though is that it's important that we are intentional about our practicing as well. It doesn't always help to play the same old stuff we know by heart. This becomes easy and boring. It's good to be intentional about sitting down and learning a new song or piece. This is what really causes our playing to get to the next level I think.

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