We recommend sitting down to develop your playing technique at first to make learning basic guitar concepts easier before you try standing and playing.
Starting out by learning how to hold your instrument correctly is essential for developing a proper playing technique no matter what kind of guitar you have. Acoustic and electric guitars don’t need amplifiers because they rely on a natural system of amplification (that’s what a guitar’s soundhole is for). If you’ve got an electric guitar, you’ll eventually need an amplifier, but it’s not necessary for this guitar tutorial or to master basic playing concepts.
Acoustic and classical guitars feature hollow wooden bodies, and electric guitars feature solid ones. Guitars are instruments that feature strings suspended over a long narrow piece of wood (the neck) that are connected to solid or hollow body. The instrument featured in this visual guide is a classical guitar, but what you’ll learn here in this guitar tutorial will be the same and applies whether you play an acoustic, classical or electric guitar. Here’s a simple visual guide to help you get started: Learning just a few guitar basics can help set you on a path towards mastering all the necessary skills needed to become proficient on the instrument.Ĭomponents of the guitar and how to hold it correctlyīefore we give you some helpful exercises to help you get your footing on this incredible instrument, it’s a good idea to get familiar with all the different components of the guitar. It’s a tool that musicians have used to create incredible music in virtually every genre over past few hundred years, and music being made with guitars continues to grow, expand and evolve with technology and innovation. This means that the guitar isn’t a linear instrument like the piano is, which makes understanding basic music theory ideas more of a challenge.īut even with these challenges, the guitar is much more approachable for beginners compared to other instruments. The guitar is an instrument that basically condenses a huge amount of range into six columns (strings). The first few weeks of playing guitar is uncomfortable and even a little painful for new students who haven’t been playing long enough to develop these protective calluses, but as soon as they’re developed, playing the guitar is relatively painless.Īpplying basic music theory concepts like scales, chords and other ideas is another significant challenge of learning the guitar.
Calluses are leathery buildups of extra skin that the body produces to protect itself. The biggest hoop students have to jump through is the uncomfortable process of building up callouses on their fingertips. The guitar is an instrument that gives students a unique set of challenges that other instruments don’t really have. You can pick up soft, medium or hard picks at your local music store. A guitar pick: There’s some amazing guitar music out there written in the fingerpicking style, but to make things easy for the purposes of this beginners guitar tutorial, we’ll get you started by playing with a hard pick.
Like metronomes, there’s plenty of cheap and free app options as well as ones you can pick up in your local music store. Tuners are devices that are able to detect the pitches your strings produce to help keep you in tune. A tuner: Your guitar will have to be tuned in a certain way to be able to produce scales, chords and riffs correctly.
You can download lots of free or inexpensive metronome apps straight to your smartphone, or your local music store should carry a few options. A metronome: This is a device that produces audible rhythms for you to practice to. An electric, acoustic or classical guitar Here’s what you’ll need to be able to get the most out of this guitar tutorial: In addition to introducing you to scales and chords, we’ll show you how to form good playing habits early on in your playing. In this guitar tutorial, we’ll give you everything you need to know to get started on this remarkable instrument. If you want to play the guitar but have no clue where or how to begin then you’ve come to the right place. That’s why we’ve created this special Musika Lessons guitar tutorial geared toward complete beginners. Without instruction, getting your footing on this incredible instrument can be really difficult. Many people of all different ages and backgrounds have tried their hand at learning how to play the guitar at one point in their lives, but sadly, being able to play the guitar is a skill that most people don’t possess and it’s easy to see why.