Easy Guitar and Lessons

A lot of people have recently been exposed to the idea of picking up the guitar as a new hobby.  While learning the basics of the guitar is rather easy to get the hang of, most people aren’t aware that they’ll need lessons and proper instruction in order to master some of the intermediate and advanced techniques of guitar playing.  While a lot of the videogame music simulations today will have people believe that making music is as easy as pushing a button and strumming strings, anyone who’s actually tried to learn the guitar quickly finds that it’s not always so easy.

The basics of learning a guitar are broken down into three general areas: correct posture and finger placement, memorizing notes/scales, and memorizing chords.  Correct seated and standing posture when playing the guitar is crucial to learn early on, so that it will be easy to perform the advanced techniques later without having to unlearn a bad habit of crouching over while strumming, for example.  Fingering charts and graphs are a beginning guitarist’s best friend at the start of basic guitar lessons, otherwise it can be somewhat daunting to try and remember where each finger goes when learning about fretting and playing notes.

The playing of the chromatic scale, and the memorization of all the notes thereof, is an essential part in finishing out the basic lessons of learning the guitar.  Without the daily practice of the chromatic scale when beginning to play the guitar, many new players find that they have not worked up the strength in their strumming hand to continue later lessons for a significant amount of time.  Not only does playing scales strengthen the fingers, it naturally reinforces the mental aspect of guitar playing by drilling the finger placements of the various notes in a player’s memory.  This serves to aid the new guitarist when they go onto the final part of their basic lessons: learning chords.

The ability to play chords is a unique aspect of the guitar that sets it apart from other musical instruments.  Not only is a guitar able to play one note at a time when playing a melody, it’s also capable of simultaneously playing in harmony with itself using chords.  Other string instruments like the piano, violin, and bass can also accomplish this feat, yet with respect to the piano a guitar is the most popular choice for musicians that want to perform a fully-harmonized song with a simple sound (with or without voice accompaniment).  Naturally, most other instrumentalists learning the trumpet or the flute will never need to know more than the chromatic scale to begin working on more advanced lessons.  But the ability of the guitar to play more than one note at a time quite effectively multiplies the lessons the new player will need to learn before they are ready to advance past the basics.  Like the piano, a guitar is never simply concerned with playing the ‘right note’, but also must be mindful of the correct chord progression, the differences in major/minor scales, and aware if all 6 of their strings are in tune with each other while playing.  The guitar is certainly easy to pick up, but lessons are definitely only mastered by those willing to practice extensively.