Teach Yourself Guitar: Tips For Beginner Guitar Players

• September 5, 2016
• Guitar Lessons

If you want to teach yourself guitar, there’s a few things you’re going to need to know.

Learning to play the guitar is a popular choice for many kids and adults each year. Ranking pretty closely with the piano over the last few years, the guitar is one of the most popular instruments around. It’s also cheaper than a piano and easier to carry around, making it a good option for just about anyone.

Once you decide that you want to learn how to play guitar, there are then many choices out there for how you want to go about doing that.

You may want to look at the pros and cons of private guitar lessons or look at the different options for online guitar lessons.

For many people out there, the best option just might be to teach yourself how to play guitar.

Whether the idea of taking control of your guitar curriculum scares or excites you, there’s a good chance you’ll have the same questions either way.

Here are a few tips to get you headed down the right path.

Teach Yourself Guitar: Determine Your Goals

Learning to play guitar can be fun, educational, and it builds discipline. There’s no shortage of reasons why you should learn to play guitar.

But you should ask yourself, “Why do I want to do this?”

When you’re first starting out, learning guitar will be exciting because there is always an element of fun to new experiences. You’ll want to ask yourself this now, because when you hit a plateau in your training or when you don’t feel like practicing, you’ll be asking it again.

Figuring out your reasons for playing guitar will also help you to form goals for what you want to achieve as a musician. Do you want to start a band? Write your own music? Maybe tour Europe one day? That’s great. You’ll need that drive to push through a few long nights along the way.

“What if I just want to play for fun on the weekends?”

No worries. That is a perfectly acceptable goal too! Even if you don’t have dreams of one day being a rock star, setting up achievable milestones along the way will help you track your success and give you cause for celebration each time you cross off an item.

You may also want to take this time to think about the kind of music that you want to play. While a general education on guitar will cover most of the basics, you may want to look into instructors/lessons that cover a specialty like the blues or country music.You can always come back to this after you feel more competent in your skills, but it never hurts to think about what genre you would enjoy playing most.

Teach Yourself Guitar: Find a Curriculum That Fits You

If you wanted to teach yourself how to play guitar 30 years ago, you were basically stuck with an old book with guitar chords and maybe a song tutorial or two. If you were lucky, there might have been a music store nearby that carried the materials necessary for you to be your own guitar instructor.

Fast forward to today and there are hundreds of websites, YouTube channels, and retailers looking to make your time more productive.

With so many options to consider, though, it can be hard to figure out which sources are really vital to you learning how to play guitar.

You may sound like a pioneer by learning to play guitar completely left to your own devices, but your sailing will be so much smoother if you pick up some online guitar lessons.

This doesn’t mean that you have to follow one solitary teacher through whatever guitar course they’ve dreamed up. On the contrary, the beauty of taking guitar lessons online is that you are in the driver’s seat for your education.

Now, you may be wondering why you shouldn’t just browse YouTube and collect videos until you’ve made your own little Frankenstein education. Why go through all of that hassle when you can simply follow a predetermined course to at least pick up that basics?

Enrolling in online guitar lessons, even for a short time, will give you a structured approach to your learning that YouTube can’t really provide on its own. If you come across something that isn’t really clicking for you in the guitar lessons, then you might want to peruse some other resources.

Again, with online guitar lessons you have the ability to learn from a collection of instructors that can help you understand techniques in different ways. With most of these lesson plans being very affordable, you might even consider enrolling in two or three websites. This would still be cheaper than private lessons and you can still learn from home on your own terms.

When you teach yourself guitar remember, whether you pursue free guitar lessons or a handful of instructors at an affordable rate, you need to set up some kind of system that gives you a complete education on guitars.

No matter what that looks like, it has to be a setup that gives you a good learning environment and the resources you need to become a better guitar player.

Teach Yourself Guitar: Keep It Interesting

When you learn guitar from a private instructor or through a class, there is a sense of accountability that helps you to push through any periods of boredom or carelessness.

These can be troubling times for the guitarist who has no one to lean on. That’s why it’s so important for you to build a curriculum that fits your lifestyle. It never hurts to listen to the advice of others, especially if they are more experienced than you, but you are the one at the end of the day that actually has to put the work in. Why not structure things to suit your personality and drive?

“Keep it interesting” means that you should have the flexibility to mix things up when you’re getting close to the breaking point. If your brain is fried, sit back and watch a performance from your favorite guitar icon. If basic lessons are boring you, pause that and spend some time trying to learn a song that you love.

Despite the importance of practice and studying, playing guitar shouldn’t feel like taking the ACT. This is a challenging, but fun activity.

To teach yourself guitar there is a long road ahead, but hopefully these tips will help in that journey. Just try to take it easy and work at a pace that is comfortable for you.

If you’re a guitar player of any skill set that is looking for online guitar lessons, you may want to check out the instructors that we have here at Pro Lessons.

Our teachers are professional musicians from popular touring acts in a variety of different genres. We’ve gathered them all together for you to learn guitar from the pros at an affordable rate that will leave plenty of change in your piggy bank.

If you’d like more information on these online guitar lesson plans, check out the link below.