How to Play Guitar

The guitar is the most popular instrument to learn how to play. Most everyone wants to be a rock star, and the guitar has the greatest mystique of all instruments.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Things You’ll Need:

• A guitar
• A guitar pick

1. First, get yourself a guitar. If a child is learning how to play, a classical guitar is a good idea because nylon strings are much easier on young fingers than steel strings. Good electric guitars are easier to play than acoustic guitars as well, as there is much better action—the space between the string and the fretboard.
2. Either get a guitar teacher, buy a book, or find a computer tutorial. Cost is a factor for any of these, especially one on one instruction. This article is about how to do it yourself.
3. Start simple. Really. It may be embarrassing to be playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” but you want to get the hang of plucking notes with one hand and hitting the notes on the fretboard.
4. Once you get the hang of that, learn scales. Not the most exciting part of learning guitar, but it will really help guitar solos without hitting wrong notes.
5. The most common chords to begin with are G, A, C, and D. Bar chords come later as they are much more strenuous. There are plenty of popular songs that use combinations of those four chords. After that you can branch off into more complicated chords. You’ll want to practice playing D to C to G, or any other combination—the idea is to form the chord quickly.

Tips & Warnings

• Play songs you’re familiar with. Buy songbooks of your favorite bands—but make sure the songbooks include the chords, not just the notes. The Beatles songbook is a good place to start, especially the “Rubber Soul” songbook. More modern songbooks might mainly consist of bar chords. Acoustic-based records are the best place to start.
• It may take some time, and some pain, to build up calluses on your fingertips, but the more you play the stronger your fingers will get.