Getting started as a guitarist can be daunting – maybe you’ve bought your first guitar already, or maybe you’re waiting to find the right guitar lessons for beginners first before pulling the trigger on your new axe. I personally learned the oldschool way by attending a half hour lesson in my home town many moons ago (I started learning around 1990), and if I can be honest – spent way too long in the beginner stage before moving on to playing the songs that I wanted to play. This extended process of learning pages of music theory and basically being treated like I wasn’t worthy of my first guitar really stunted my growth as a guitarist in the early days – remember the episode of Friends where Phoebe wraps Joey across the knuckles for “touching the guitar before he was ready”? I had a similar experience, and made very little progress until one little thing changed in my approach to learning guitar.
Fortunately, I found a new teacher that changed absolutely everything for me by teaching me all the fundamentals required to become a great guitar player, and showing me how to put them in practice by working through songs of my choice using these foundation techniques. The learning curve was initially very steep in the ‘old model’ of theory first, and playing second – but this new Foundation First approach could only be described as a steady improvement curve. Every time I learned another one of my favourite songs, my technique improved. It really was a win-win situation for me; the more songs I learned, the better I became and the more challenging songs I could then approach.
Almost 30 years down the track I have now structured my own approach to guitar fundamentals to make the process of learning guitar even more streamlined, simple and easy to follow.
Learning How To Play Guitar Online
You might think that having guitar videos at the click of a button on YouTube makes the process of learning to play guitar easier for you – but the truth is, half of these videos are either far too advanced for your currently abilities as a beginner guitarist, or, they’re created by other beginner to intermediate guitarists who themselves are struggling with various habits and limitations in their playing ability, and are likely to pass on these same bad habits to you. I found that many of the guitar lesson VHS tapes I purchased as a kid in the 90’s had a similar disheartening effect on my playing – at the time I simply couldn’t keep up with guitarists like Paul Gilbert and Zakk Wylde with their super fast delivery and extreme chops, when I was personally still struggling with the fundamentals and my ability to play with clear articulation. In the beginning stages of learning to play guitar, faster isn’t necessarily better, instead, better technique will let you play and improve faster.
This all absolutely changed when I went back to the fundamentals and realised that I really was missing quite a few of the foundation elements of guitar technique, and my playing was incredibly uneven between techniques like picking, hammer-ons, legato, strumming and my knowledge of scales and chords. After all, what is the point of being a shred master if you can’t play a simple chord progression?
By attacking the foundation elements of guitar in a structured and simple way, my playing made much more progress in a short time – and I very quickly surpassed the level of the guitar teachers in my area and started to teach others how to reach the same levels of success with the very simple progress of guitar fundamentals.
Just like the fundamentals of learning how to sing, the fundamentals of playing guitar really are like the ‘house’ that your guitar playing is built upon; the rock solid base that your guitar chops are being built on each day as a practice and learn new songs. A great place to start with guitar lessons for beginners is the Guitar Fundamentals course available here at Bohemian Guitar Studio, in which you will learn;
- Get to know your guitar
- Guitar fundamentals (Posture, Holding the pick, Fretting basics)
- Changing strings and tuning your guitar (plus 5 rookie mistakes)
- Playing melodies
- Reading guitar tab and chord charts
- Basic Chords and Barre Chord patterns
- Left hand technique (hammer-ons, Pull-offs, slides)
- Right hand technique (strumming, alternate picking, down picking, finger picking)
- Hand communication
- The Major, Minor and Blues Scales
- Basic soloing elements
- Warmup Exercises
With this streamlined and well structured approach to learning the fundamentals of guitar, it’s never been easier to learn to play guitar correctly.
If you have any questions about guitar lessons for beginners, feel free to leave any feedback or questions below!