Where Do I Start?
Staying on the theme of my last post, it’s so important to keep up your enjoyment of playing guitar so that you have the drive to keep going.
Learning guitar is not a 5 minute exercise, it will take some time. Everyone is different, so understand that your own road to playing guitar may be longer or shorter than someone else. That’s cool… The most important thing is to enjoy playing, that’s why you started, right?
But, there are several things that I will talk about in future posts that can help you move forward more quickly, and without a lot of the pain that so many new guitarist go through using older teaching systems and without knowing some key points about their instrument.
Here is a short list of things that I highly recommend you look at sooner, rather than later, if you are just starting out, or even if you have been playing for some time.
- Have your guitar inspected and “Setup” by a qualified guitar technician. Ironically, it’s almost more important for a beginner to have his or her guitar setup correctly with the “Action” set to suit both the instrument and the player. So many beginners try to play guitars with bad action and intonation, and they struggle to get good sounds from the instrument. More on this in a later post…
- Choose music that you love to listen to, and start working on playing it. Start with music that is near to your level of playing. You may have a teacher who is teaching you styles that are not in your favorite music style. It’s OK for you to start having fun playing the music you enjoy. Keep up your enthusiasm.
- Learn Guitar Tabs. There is so much music written for guitar using guitar tabs, that you will probably be able to find some of the music you like to listen to, already written for you in tab format.
I’ll go into more detail a little later, but for now, you can have a think about the type of music you like to listen to, and try to get a feel for how you might play it on guitar.