Everyone wants the secret to learning the guitar fast as well as the best way to learn the guitar.
No matter whether it’s acoustic or electric, or left or right-handed….
I believe I have the answer after 20 years of playing and teaching.
So read the entire article, and I’ll tell you the worst beginner guitar mistakes I made, my students made, and what skills in what order you need to learn.
Trust me. This will save you at least several weeks of setbacks alone so keep on reading to learn the best way to learn the guitar!
But first, here’s the worst way……
First, The Worst Way, According To My Guitar Center Students
I spent almost a year at Guitar Center before I started teaching here at Play It Loud, and these are the problems I still see very often…..
— Ignoring your instructor’s advice. I get you want to find a shortcut, but if there was one….your instructor would definitely tell you. Your best bet is to listen to more experienced players as they can see lots of problems up ahead that you haven’t encountered yet.
— Don’t learn how to read tabs. Yes, I had a few students that somehow thought this could be avoided. This is a very bad idea as your memory is bad and your ear will not be developed to pick out certain sounds yet.
— Don’t learn chords. Yep I had this one too. All music moves in chords or are built off of chords and made into riffs. Not doing this will only set you up with bad playing habits because of bad fingering habits.
— Never pick out songs you wanta learn. If you’re not excited enough about learning the guitar that you can’t pick out some songs you are dying to learn, then this is not the instrument for you. I believe all sorts of music, old and new, can be played on acoustic or electric, but you must have some love of music to inspire you to learn the instrument.
— Try to play stuff not at your level. If you don’t play video games at expert level when you’re first learning, then you shouldn’t do so with guitar either is what I told one student. There’s no shame in playing an easy version of a riff or a chord. More than likely it’ll help you learn good habits and help you learn even faster.
— Believing in myths about talent like having “natural talent.” No one becomes Hendrix or Van Halen in one lesson or one month or one year. It’s just not possible without the same knowledge and muscle memory, and you can only get that by working on it everyday.
— Finally, if you treat the guitar as a chore you must do for 10, 20, or 30 minutes a day, then you’re only setting yourself up to quit. Keep it simple. Learn one chord at a time, one riff at a time, practice one song at a time, etc. This is a lot less pressure on yourself, and you’ll find the time passing much quicker too.
If you’re curious about why most of my students never made it past the first few months, then read this article by clicking here…..
Accept That This Is The Best Way To Learn A Riff Or Song….
This is the workflow that I use to learn easy AC/DC riffs and complicated John Petrucci of Dream Theater solos……
Listen to the song
Match what I hear to the guitar tab. Most everything has a guitar tab now.
Determine the key if possible so I can best remember the chords.
Acquaint myself with any new chords I don’t recognize.
PIck the best finger position for each part of the riff or chord
Learn it in chunks of a few notes at a time
Repeat the whole riff or chord progression slowly until I’ve built the muscle memory
Play it until I can match the song as closely as possible
That’s it.
Except for determining the key, it’s hard to skip any other part of this workflow.
Not every riff or song will be exactly the same, but you’ll same some chords and patterns over and over and over again.
How I Taught Myself How To Play The Guitar
All I had back in 2003 was a few websites like Ultimate Guitar, a chord book, and a friend who had been playing about ten years before I had started. He lived about 30 minutes away though and I couldn’t text him any questions at that time.
So I just used trial and error for everything.
That was not a great idea though as I developed lots of bad habits like downpicking every note in a solo, which I did for two years before someone pointed that out to me.
Even now, I’ve found I’ve been making mistakes with sweep picking that could’ve been easily corrected if I just had a good course or instructor.
But at that time, I just learned one song at a time, and one lick at a time.
Sometimes I played things that were way too hard, and other times I sped through many riffs because I had already solved the problems of learning it with another riff I had learned before.
So choose wisely where you get your information from.
I had no YouTube and that may have been a blessing as I didn’t have time to think about whether this advice I was getting was right or wrong.
But trust me, you’re in a good place to learn.
YouTube Can Be A Great Tool If Used Like This
At first, you’re going to have lots of trouble with each part of the workflow up above.
You’ll get tired of the song and want to go to another, which is a big problem with Youtube learning.
A lot of times you’ll get a bad tab or guitar pro file and can’t match what you see to what you hear. Other times, you don’t have the ear yet to match what you see yet.
And then, the whole process can be tedious because you may believe that playing guitar was supposed to be easy.
Read this carefully…..
There. Is. No. Way. Around. This. Work.
Sometimes it’ll go fast and sometimes it won’t.
But once you get addicted to learning one riff or song after another….you will enjoy the challenge.
Focus On This Aspect Of Practice
I see and get lots of questions about how long to practice everyday, and I believe this is the wrong way to look at practice.
You will not become a professional level player by simply forcing yourself to sit down with the guitar for several hours or a few minutes a day.
What will help you get better is learning more songs and more challenging licks and riffs.
So focus instead on that instead of counting down the minutes until you can go back to videogames, netflix, or whatever it is you’re hoping to do after practice.
Tell yourself: “Today I’ll attempt this song” or “Today I’ll learn a new chord” or “Today I’ll try soloing over this progression with this scale.”
Don’t worry I’ll you more specifics at the end of this article about the fastest way to learn the guitar….
Go Watch Some Tabs And Learn How That Works
What a lot of people don’t tell you at first is that you need to develop your ear.
In other words, you need to learn how to spot out the sound of chords, single note riffs, low pitched sounds, high pitched sounds, various types of picking techniques, various fret-hand techniques, and much more.
This is a constant process and it’s why learning songs is the best way to develop your ear.
Thankfully, you can start watching a channel like Mr. Tabs and see the music in tablature as it’s played.
This was an immense help to me that lots of my students never utilized.
Want to play like slash does? I’ll teach you how he makes his licks and riffs in my course linked in the image below:
Look For Similar Chord Shapes Like The Barre Chord
The reason everyone starts with G, C, D, Em, E, A, and Am is that these shapes will reoccur all over the fretboard in many different ways.
The A and E chords in particular will be used a lot as they’re the basis of “powerchords.”
G, C, D, and many other chords that vary just slightly will be used too.
What will speed up your ability to learn songs is by realizing this and to practice seeing finding these chord shapes over and over again.
Use Good Fingering And Thumb Placement
This is a big one that my students had that is more particular than just “learn some chord shapes.”
If you can’t keep your fret hand still and conserve movement while in one position, you’ll make lots of other small movements that’ll hinder your ability to play songs, chords, riffs, etc.
This is why I created a quick lesson and pdf of the 5 Absolute Beginner Guitar Exercises.
It’ll help you build the necessary habits to avoid bad habits that’ll thwart your ability to build good muscle memory.
You can sign up for it by clicking the image below, and filling in the form on this page.
Buy A Guitar Course With Online Guitar Lessons! (Mine To Be Exact)
Any search for courses will probably have you inundated by truefire, guitar tricks dot com, pickupmusic, justin guitar, and many many others.
They all have their strengths, but most of them don’t teach you the music you want…..
And most of them just give you a lick and don’t explain how to use it or how it was made.
With beginner courses, you’ll be lucky if you hear a lot of the things I’ve already told you in this article alone.
So that’s why I created my course called the Play It Loud Method.
It’s a pathway from going from absolute beginner to an advanced player who can improvise and solo, write songs, and be a musician in a band.
I do this without long videos, without nursery rhymes, and without sheet music.
Most of it is designed so that you can easily find and reference the concept or song you’re currently working on….and then get right back to playing and practicing.
I created it because no one taught me how to use music theory, how to solo, how to write songs, or what bad playing habits to avoid.
So I hope you’ll go and learn more about my method if you plan on using the tips I’ve shared here in this article…..
Learn These Essential Skills
Now finally, here’s a list of the skills you need to learn immediately, which my course goes over in a lot more detail……..
Make friends with tab sites like ultimate guitar. You’ll need them to get accurate tabs and not waste time learning and relearning songs.
Learn how tabs and chord diagrams work.
Understand the numbers behind finger positioning and right hand fingerpicking.
Learn some basic scales like minor pentatonic and major scales.
Practice using various types of picking methods like downpicking, alternate picking, and hybrid picking to name a few.
Acquaint yourself with various legato techniques like slides, hammer-ons and pull-offs, and taps from nowhere.
For intermediate players, start thinking in patterns of up down up down when it comes to licks and advanced rhythm playing.
Learn the basic chords mentioned earlier in this article…..they’re the basis of most of the shapes you’re going to learn
Don’t focus so much on tapping, sweep picking, pinch harmonics, and other wilder techniques at first. Get the fundamentals down before all of that.
Finally, start learning to match the tabs you see to the music you hear. This will develop your ear, and once you practice this enough your learning will get a lot faster.