Your Skill Checklist in Learning to Play the Guitar

Learning to play the guitar may be easy, but there are still good and bad habits that you should always keep in mind. The rules are simple: take note of the following do's and don'ts so that you don't waste your time and effort for nothing.

It takes time and patience to play the guitar. If you don't have these two qualities, you might as well throw your guitar away because it can only bore and annoy you. Investing patience means listening to the song you want to play as frequently as possible. You are trying to get the idea of the song, so it is advisable to really get familiar with the song. Learning to play the guitar means that you have to be able to detail out every melody, pitch and frequency of the notes and patterns of the chords being played. Transferring the melodies to the guitar is easy once you are able to find out how the songs has been produced in the first place.

If you are really interested in learning to play the guitar then you should first master finger variations. You can do it if you are already familiar with the chords as these are the most fundamental knowledge for every guitarist. You cannot even play the simplest melody without the knowledge of guitar chords because these are the basics of learning the guitar. Once you have mastered them, your fingers will naturally follow.

The next thing to learn is strumming. Good strumming will enable you to play the guitar as a rhythm guitarists of a band or as a solo performer, just to amaze your friends. A good musician must be well-balanced and equipped when it comes to guitar skills - that is, he or she must be capable of both plucking and strumming. There are several ways in strumming your guitars and these are usually coupled with patterns to induce variations and style. Learning the correct strumming is relatively difficult because you have to maintain a steady and firm tempo and still be able to follow the melody. You can do this by constantly listening to the song you wish to play. Also, strum the strings according to the type of music - if you are playing jazz music with a too determined (rock style) type of stumming, it will simply sound wrong and it will be easily recognised as a mistake you are making. Because of that you should always get to know the song well enough to know what goes with it and what doesn't.

If you are a guitar beginner, then you can rely on tablatures as they provide guitarists the finger patterns of the notes without having to deal with too many difficulties of actually figuring out the song on your own. If you are finding it hard to read and study tabs, don't waste too much time on a single part of the song you just can't get right - this will just slow you down and that won't be helpful in your guitar lessons at all, because you need to advance quite quickly in order to stay motivated. It's strongly advised to break the song down into smaller parts (intro, verse, chorus, solo, outro) and learn them one at a time. There are several advantages of using tablatures. With them, you can learn to play your favourite song quite accurately in a matter of hours or less. You can also learn only the part of the song that you are interested in playing. All the same, learning to play the guitar through reading tabs still requires a lot of patience and effort, but it's all guaranteed to be worth your while.

Will Griffin has been playing both acoustic and electric guitar for more than 10 years. For his guitar needs he visits YourChords.com.

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