How to get started on guitar - stringing and tuning
Need help tuning or stringing the guitar or even buying a guitar?
VIEW LESSONAbsolutely. In fact, I believe it to be the best way for complete beginners to learn guitar and one of the best ways for existing guitar players to break out of any rut they might be in.
The traditional way of learning guitar is to teach the new student a bunch of common chords and tell them to keep going until they can change between them fluently and strum a compelling rhythm. That's a lot of things that need to be working before the student sounds good and enjoys it.
Compare that to showing a student just the G chord and showing them how to do a million interesting things with it using fingerpicking. It just sticks. And once the guitar practice becomes playful, adding more chords and becoming more musical happens naturally.
For existing guitarists who are bored by just strumming chords, it's the same principle. And for intermediate guitar players, the art of developing a style where they can play a melody at the same time as a bassline or chords is invigorating to say the least!
Fingerstyle is suitable for beginners and for all levels of guitar player.
Fingerstyle guitar is the easiest and quickest way to be able to play something musical on a guitar. Fingerpicking patterns are not hard to learn or remember and as I said above, you can play them even just fretting a single chord on your guitar.
If you want to become the next Chet Atkins or Tommy Emmanual, that's going to take a bit of time. No doubt about it. But the learning path and the rewarding feeling from playing fingerstyle means you don't face a steep learning path that results in you throwing in the towel before you've even started to experience it.
With a few principles and guidelines, you'll be fingerpicking in no time and you'll play the guitar more each day. Don't take my word for it - try it and see for yourself.
I would suggest buying a guitar stand, putting the guitar on it for easy access and dedicating the same 15 minute slot per day (or habit stack your practice that it happens just after something you regularly do!).
Set a timer and stop after 15 minutes, put the guitar back in the stand. You can always take it back out a few seconds later. After about a week or two you won't even have to think about it any more.
I have created a course for beginners that is the fastest way to learn fingerstyle. This breaks down the material into 31 sections each of which can be tackled in 15 minutes and designed to get you fingerpicking quickly. The course is called Zero to Learn Fingerpicking in 30 Days and teaches you everything you need to know including how to read tab, string a guitar, learn a few chords, count rhythm and most importantly master fingerpicking technique and patterns in the right order.
I also have a 105 page learn fingerpicking ebook which you can use to give you this structure.
Need help tuning or stringing the guitar or even buying a guitar?
VIEW LESSONT132 is a great fingerpicking pattern for beginners
VIEW LESSONThe most important fingerpicking lesson of them all - playing fingerstyle with correct fingers
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