The main reason why I love YouTube.com is because I can take all the guitar lessons I want for free and some of the teachers posting up tutorials are pretty excellent on guitar to say the least. I’ve never be able to access that kind of quality living here in my small town so it’s truly a Godsend for me. Anytime I feel like practicing (which is pretty much every day, especially at night) I can go online and start searching for how to play this song or that, shut the door of my office and forget about the world and especially my J.O.B!
First I began by learning to play some of the most basic chords like E minor, A minor, G and D. These felt hard at first but gradually they become easy, you just have to keep at it and stay consistent with your practice. After that I started to learn some of the more popular guitar strums and I found that with 3 or 4 all-round good ones you can actually play tons of popular radio songs. This was one aspect of playing music which I found very surprising.
Here’s a guitar lesson I’m working on at the moment as an example. The youtube guitar lessons channel is here
Here’s another cool example, this internet guitar lesson is all about how to play the classic Eric Clapton tune of “Wonderful Tonight”.
This one is for an older John Denver song, Country Roads
So once you’re at the stage where you can strum along in typical “beginner level” fashion to sing-a-long songs the next step is to try some harder songs with Barre chords (WARNING: WILL FEEL COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE AT FIRST!) and then finally get into other styles of guitar such as blues, country, Spanish guitar and my favorite, fingerstyle. I’d give anything to be able to play guitar like James Taylor. What a gorgeous sound.
Everyone kind of goes through the same initial process when starting out and kind of learn the same things as everyone else. Soon however you’ll find that you’re able to get into more and more specific styles of guitar playing and it’s really up to you to decided in which direction you want to go. Basically, what would you love to be able to play and who would you love to sound like on guitar? That’s the best way to find out which style of guitar playing you’d have the most passion and motivation to achieve.
If you try to force yourself into learning a style of music that you’re not that into then you’re going to quickly find yourself in a steep uphill struggle to maintain your motivation. Choose something which you’d give anything to be able to play and follow that direction, it’s natural and much more effective.
My best advice is to teach yourself using guitar websites for around 6 months to a year BEFORE going out to find a local guitar teacher. By that time you’ll have a pretty good idea about what you’re main problems are when it comes to guitar and you can get a guitar teacher to really help you out there. Things like learning the shapes of chords or the directions of strumming patterns are super easy to do on your own – you don’t need to pay for expensive private lessons to do that so save your money!