Tips to Starting to Learn to Play Guitar

Starting to learn to play guitar can be a very enjoyable activity, but it can also be a very frustrating one. If you go into it with unrealistic expectations, then you are going to be setting yourself up for disappointment. However, if you realize what you are going to come up against down the road, you should have a better chance of pushing through the difficulty and achieving what you set out to do, actually learning to play the guitar.

1) There Is No “Magic” Guitarist Gene
It’s really shocking how many people think that certain people are just automatically good at playing guitar and others aren’t. Guitar and music are skills that require someone put the time and effort to learn and practice them, and while people might learn at different paces, that isn’t the same thing. Even the idea that some people have better hands doesn’t work, Django Reinhardt had two partially paralyzed fingers from being badly burned in a fire and he still continued to play guitar and was quite well known for it. Becoming a good guitarist does take quite a lot of work and practice, it isn’t something where suddenly someone picks up a guitar and they are suddenly a virtuoso.

2) Music Theory Doesn’t “Limit” Your Creativity
This misconception comes up because there are famous guitarists that actually spout this, and coincidentally, these are always guitarists with little to no knowledge of actual music theory. If you learn the theory behind musical concepts, it makes much easier to learn new aspects of guitar playing and to understand what you are actually doing. Music theory does give guidelines to what are good rules of thumb for songwriting, but those are more geared for people starting out learning theory. It is difficult to understand the more advanced music theory concepts that would “break the rules” without knowing the basic rules of thumb. While there are plenty of successful guitarists without any real knowledge of music theory, it is still a very useful thing to pick up and learn. There is a reason why there are almost no virtuoso guitarists without a solid grasp of theory, after all.

3) Playing Guitar for Twelve Hours a Day Isn’t Necessarily Practice
There are a lot of guitarists that will claim they practice for rather absurdly long lengths of time. However, very rarely are these people actually practicing. There are exceptions, like Steve Vai’s 10 Hour Workout (which is actually 10 hour long practice sessions played one after another), but most of the time, they just are sitting around playing guitar for that length of time. This is not the same thing as practice. If you can play a song perfectly, you will gain very, very little benefit from playing it over and over again, except for the rather minimal amount of practice it takes to keep in practice for that particular song.

The thing a beginning guitarist needs to understand about practice is that you get better by practicing things you are bad at or can’t do, not by practicing things you can do perfectly. Sometimes this might mean working on a technique you are still sloppy at or by practicing something just a little faster than you can play, but the key is that you need to work on those areas to get better.

Think about it like weightlifting, you can spend years lifting a 50 pound weight, but no matter how much time you spend lifting that 50 pound weight, you can’t necessarily lift a 200 pound weight. This is actually a very appropriate metaphor because guitarists do need to build finger strength and dexterity to play more difficult pieces, and that is only done by practicing things that are difficult. A weightlifter has to constantly up the amount of weight to improve how much they can lift, while a guitarist has to practice faster and more difficult pieces to get better. It may be frustrating at times to practice things you can’t play, but the satisfaction of perfecting that particular technique is definitely worth it in the end.

Keep on rockin'!