Make this a habit so that your guitar will always be in tune for when you’re practicing, or playing for / with others. Tuning your guitar is very important and should be done every time before you start playing. You may also want to play around with holding the pick in various positions. Pick holding preference is subjective and will depend on what you feel is most comfortable. Try to keep a medium grip that holds it in place without moving around too much when you play. When holding the pick don’t grip down on it too hard but also don’t hold it so loosely that it will fly out of your hand when you start to play. When holding the pick, the majority of it should be covered by your thumb and finger with only a couple of centimetres sticking out. To hold the pick, simply lay the wide end flat between your index finger and your thumb. Choosing the right pick for you will depend on what you feel comfortable with, but for starters any regular sized pick will work. I like to use a regular sized pick that has medium flex to it. There is likely a huge selection of picks at your local music shop and they can be any combination of thick, thin, solid, flexible, wide, skinny. Using a pick when you’re first starting is recommended as it is much easier to pluck the strings. Try to avoid this habit as much as possible as it makes the guitar harder to play and will cause more discomfort. A lot of new guitar players tend to slouch the guitar so that it’s easier to see their fingers. Try to be aware of any slouching either from your body or the guitar itself. If you’re left-handed, simply do the opposite. The guitar should rest on your upper left leg, left arm wraps around the body of the guitar and your right hand is supporting the neck. Additionally, your left hand should be used to cradle the neck of the guitar so that your thumb sits on top or behind the neck (whichever is most comfortable) while your fingers are on the strings. Ensure the back of the guitar is pressed up against your chest and that your right arm is wrapped around the body of the guitar so that your hand ends up in front of the soundhole. If you’re right-handed start off by resting the guitar on the upper part of your right leg. Holding your guitar properly ensures that you will maintain good posture and therefore your back, shoulders, and arms won’t get sore as quickly (although you’ll likely still experience some discomfort at first). Now that we got that covered, let’s move on to the next step. Try to remember the above acronym or make one on your own to help remember the open string notes. For instance, I like to use the following example to help me remember what each open string is. Here is a quick visualization:Ī simple way to remember the notes is to associate each letter with a word. Starting from the thickest to the thinest string, the notes are assigned as follows: E A D G B E. This will help you with tuning your guitar (shown in later step) as well as give you a starting point for when you choose to learn more about the note structure of the fretboard (we won’t worry about that for now). Knowing what note each string corresponds to on the guitar is an important first step. Let’s start off this section by learning the notes that each of the six guitar strings correspond to. If any guitar part names are foreign to you, consult the following guitar anatomy guide to get a better understanding of which name corresponds to which part of the guitar. During this section we’ll mention parts of the guitar you may or may not be familiar with yet.
HOW TO PLAY GUITAR HOW TO
The basics include everything from learning how to tune your guitar, to how to hold it properly, etc. The first part of learning how to play guitar from scratch is learning the basics.