For Love Of The Guitar

So now that I gave you a background about why I started playing the guitar, I am going to take you through exactly how I learned. I will go through step by step my techniques, struggles, and successes. I know I can relate to the beginner guitar players out there, so I hope I can inspire you "newbies" to keep going.

In the beginning: The first three months

Plucking the strings

The first thing I did was hold a guitar pick and pluck each one of the six strings. Then I would hit every other string back and forth repeatedly until I drove my soon to be wife insane. I'm actually shocked she still married me after hearing a less than rhythmic "dunnnn... dunnnn... dunnnn" for five straight hours.

One of the first things I did was figure out an easy way to remember the string names. If you are a beginner guitar player, you should do the same. I memorized them by saying to myself "Eat All Day Get Big easy." (Get it? For beginners, E, A, D, G, B, and e are the notes of the open strings from top to bottom, 6th to 1st strings)

Plucking my first notes

Now instead of hitting the strings open, I moved on to different notes across the fret board. Experiencing the initial pain of pressing my fingertips onto steel strings and making contact with the neck of the guitar would prove to be an adventure. In the beginning I thought there was no way I would ever condition my fingers to be able to play notes clearly. It felt so uncomfortable, but I didn't give up. After creating some pretty nasty calluses on my finger tips, I kept playing those notes, albeit very slowly, out of rhythm, and sometimes muffled. Our Director of Music, David Vance talks about the frustrations of learning the guitar, check them out while you are here!

Forming my first chords

Once I got bored with playing individual notes and "do re mi fa so la ti" all day, I wanted to move onto playing chords. I would soon learn how difficult it is to play a series of notes at the same time without that annoying muffling sound. If you are just beginning, don't get discouraged. Just play the chords over and over and you'll get better, I guarantee it. Put a metronome on and every time it "beeps", play the chord. Then, over time, increase the speed of the "beeps" on the metronome. Practicing with a metronome is one of the most important things you will ever do when learning the guitar. I wish I had started practicing with one sooner, even though I was told from a friend that I should. I guess I didn't know any better so I figured it wasn't that important (stupid me). I started with the D Major Chord, then moved on to the C Major, and then all the other basic major and minor chords. The G Major was the worst! That one took forever, but eventually I got it - and you will too. Repetition!!!

Once I could play some simple chords, I learned how to strum. Brushing the pick against the all strings at once was a beautiful sound (after I finally got it to ring out without muffling any of the notes). I remember strumming the G Major chord and thinking, wow, I just made music. I know that sounds lame, but you have start somewhere, right? I started with all down strokes, then down and up strokes, then mixed them up for more difficult strumming patterns. This is very awkward at first, so if you are a beginner take your time and be patient, it will come.