At the Beginning

When you first decide to learn guitar, you then have to figure out where to start. Each of us could be a little more experience in music or aware of how the guitar is setup. Some may be brand new to all of it. I personally have dabbled a little in both music and the guitar in the past to have some of the very basics done. I apologize to the readers who are a little further into it, but I figure I should start with the absolute basics first so that no one gets left behind.

The very first things you are going to want to learn before you play anything are going to be some of the following

           1)      How to hold the guitar

           2)      What string is what

           3)      How to hold a pick, if you are going to use one

           4)      What are guitar tabs

Once you become familiar with all of the above then it is time to start learning your basic chords. I searched around a lot of places online when I decided to learn guitar (again) and I personally thought Justin Guitar offered the simplest and easy to follow online lessons that were available free of charge. So my first stop for all of you absolute beginners is the Justin Guitar Beginner Series Lessons page. For good or bad, I will tell you that I personally could only handle going so slow, so I used Justin’s lessons to learn the basics and the majority of the open chords by skipping around his lessons. But then I wanted to be able to play more songs than what he was getting to. So although I highly recommend his lessons, I won’t discourage you from moving on after learning the basic chords. Especially since I know I will soon be making posts about some other very useful sources for learning the guitar online.

One tip I will give you is don’t feel the need to memorize every single chord to start. Eventually as you use them you will remember them better. To get started I would say be able to remember and play the D, C, G, E, and A chords. Perhaps the F chord as well although for a beginner I would stick with the “cheater” F chord. Once you have those down, you can gradually add other chords as you need them. I do recommend having easy to use chord references available. Below is a nice free chord sheet you can print out for your wall or you could do like I do and put a chords app on your phone.