As in any other musical instrument, learning how to play the guitar required a lot of practice, patience and perseverance. You need to be persistent and not give up at the first failure. Do not expect to learn how to play the guitar on your first try.

If you really want to learn to play the guitar well, you must make sure that you have a guitar and if you don’t, then go ahead and buy a guitar or there is no way you can do your own practice.

Learning how to play guitar required a strong coordination and communication between the muscles of your hand and brain. Before you start your practice, do some stretching and warming up so as to loosen the tension in your muscle. You must ensure that you are very relax, free of any tension, stiffness, discomfort, or pain because it can get worst when you start practicing.

For the first few times, your fingers might get sore as you do a lot of strumming and picking. That is natural, do not give up. After a few sessions of practice, you will get used to it and they will get better. It is also essential that when you first started playing the guitar, try to practice daily, but keep the session short.

Okay, now you are ready to start playing the guitar with the following steps.

1. Tune your guitar

It is important that the guitar is being tuned as it will affect the sound being product when you do strumming and picking. Doing this will also help you to get familiar with the string and fret combinations correspond with which notes.

2. Read guitar tabs

Guitar tablature or guitar tabs are a simple method of transcribing guitar music. This is a very popular method used to learn new playing techniques or to learn your favorite songs. The basic idea is to look at the guitar tab as if you look at your guitar; with each line corresponds to a string, and each number tells you which fret to hold down when plucking that string.

3. Hold the guitar

Sit on an armless chair and place the guitar in your lap with the back touching your chest. Assuming you are right-handed, rest the body of the guitar on your right leg and use your left hand to grip the neck of the guitar. Your right hand will strumming or picking individual strings. Vice versa for left-handed.

4. Play the guitar

It should be the most difficult of all especially you have no one to show you physically how to play the guitar. You can try strumming using either a guitar pick or your fingertips. Strumming consist of downward and upward direction, and no matter which way you play, you need to sweep across all of the strings with even pressure and steady speed.

Next, try to play a chord, meaning a group of notes. For a start, learn how to play a few key chord and practice till you can move comfortably between them without losing your rhythm. When you can play a few chords well, you can then pick guitar song to learn and play. Start from the easier songs, those with fewer chords and slowly moves on to the harder one.

Quite simple, isn’t it? As stated, the most difficult is the strumming and playing chords. Try to get someone to guide you along and you should be on your way to playing your favorite songs soon.

Have fun with guitar playing!