Basic Guitar Lessons - What are They?

People often express a wish to take basic guitar lessons. This wish indicates that people want to know more about the guitar so let us take a look at where the quest for basic guitar lessons takes us. First we need a definition of what basic guitar lessons are. I think they give you the ability to strum chords with a plectrum on an acoustic or electric guitar. So let us see if we can go a little deeper into what potential guitar students want and what they can get.

One thing novice guitarists ask about is whether they can learn to play the guitar without paying for lessons. This is possible, especially now that we can see many guitarists in action close up on video. This goes some way towards making up for the lack of a real, live guitar teacher. There are also free lessons on the internet that are aimed at the beginner guitarist. Make use of Google -  do a search for free guitar lessons. Buying a guitar tutor book would also help.

The request for basic guitar lessons carries the assumption that if I learn the basic principles of playing the guitar I am now equipped to progress further. So what are the basics that we need?  First, you need the ability to hold the guitar in an effective playing position. From there you can learn to play chords. There is plenty of information on chord families and how to learn them on the net, and in fact you do not need to know very much music theory to take care of learning chords. Guitar lesson videos on YouTube and similar video sites are also a great help with chords.

In order to learn chords you need to learn to read chord charts which is quite easy, but you could consider learning to read sheet music or tab. The ability to read some kind of musical notation is not necessary to learn to play chords but it is the way forward for you future progress in music. If you want to learn blues for instance, you will need to find out about the blues scale, the pentatonic scale and movable chords.

Learning to play chords should be done on an acoustic guitar so that your left hand finger tips get the callouses needed to withstand hours of practice. Once you have the callouses you can start working on learning how to play the electric guitar. So for a student of the electric guitar basic lessons would include some tuition on how to set up the electric guitar, how a whammy bar works, what vibrato is and fooling around with distortion and other effects.

Another way to approach the question of teaching yourself basic guitar is to simply learn songs that you enjoy listening to. If you  learn in this way you are not learning music theory and you may be giving yourself physical problems in later life because of practicing using too much tension. Also you could very well miss out on getting paid gigs because you cannot read sheet music. It happens. The other side of that coin is Jimmy Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and many other successful guitar players never had lessons. Guitar lessons impose a mode of thinking and working on us and if you think struggling on without lessons will help you keep your creative juices intact, then use all the tools the internet can provide to get the basic guitar lessons you need for to be YOUR kind of guitar player.