How To: Start Playing Guitar (For Beginners)

Do you think playing guitar is that easy? It takes time and effort to learn the basic to extreme skills for playing a guitar! But you're lucky, simply because I will make everything easy for you by teaching you how to play guitar, my friend!

Step 1 Anatomy of a Guitar

Let's start! It's important to learn the basic parts and functions of a guitar for you to understand every detail and the skills that will be discuss below. How can you play a guitar perfectly if you don't know even its parts? And how can you expand your skills and knowledge if you don't know all the details and functions of the parts to a guitar? It simply shows that knowing the basic parts and function of a guitar is vital in learning how to play a guitar, my friend.

Perhaps the easiest part to learning how to playing the guitar is memorizing the parts. For the functions of an acoustic guitar, check out this link that explains them all, my friend.

Step 2 Guitar Chords

Next! Let's play the strings of a guitar, my friend. Learning chords is quite difficult for beginners, and it takes practice, practice, practice in order to perfect all the basic cords that should know by heart. As a beginner, it's important to learn this basic chords. You can learn the basic chords by using the following chord chart.

It's an example of a basic chord chart. The X stands for dead strings, O stands for open strings, the black dots stand for the fingers that should be place at the fretboard, and the numbers represent: 1 (pointing finger), 2 (middle finger), 3 (ring finger) and 4 (little finger). The letters stands for the chords that you play. 

Tips

• Just strum four times downward while practicing with the basic chords until you get them down.
• It only takes patience and practice in order to master the chords. If you're good at playing and shifting with the basic chords, then everything down the road will be easy.
• At first, your fingers will hurt by playing the basic chords over and over again, but this is normal and expected for a beginner to experience. Don't worry, my friend, as you keep playing you'll never notice the pain.

Step 3 Strumming

Okay! Let's make our basic cords come to life with a rhythm through strumming the strings! This is also important in playing the guitar because it makes the rhythm of the melody.

Strumming a guitar is not that easy to do—it takes feeling to hit the rhythm of the melody. You can start learning how to strum with this link my friend. That's it for the strumming!

Tip

• You will find it difficult at first, but through practicing shifting and playing the basic cords, it's possible to be a good guitar player.

Step 4 Practice, Expand, Enjoy

Yes! Now you know all the basic information in playing guitar for a beginners. All you have to do now is practice all of the basic knowledge, because an expert guitar player is good at base and basic knowledge. Don't limit yourself in just doing the basics, try to learn new knowledge and skills for your growth as a guitar player, my friend. And lastly, play the guitar with feeling and enjoy every melody that you make through your guitar. By just following this advice, you might be recruited in a band or maybe a musician playing in large crowd together! Play it with feeling and enjoy!