Learning to play guitar is a serious endeavour that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Once you have a little physical hands-on experience under your belt with the guitar, you can relax and begin to make choices about the style of music you wish to learn, and the way in which you wish to learn it.
When you have learnt the basic chord structures, and how they can be moved up and down the fretboard, you can experiment with strumming patterns. When you become accomplished at that, you can start to learn a few finger picking patterns. You must never lose sight of your number one goal - enjoyment of your musical efforts.
It's a bit of a vicious circle really, as part of learning to play guitar is, determining which way of learning is the best for you. You probably have many questions.
How many ways of learning are there? Are books the best source of guitar learning information? Or is it better to pick some of my favorite songs and concentrate on learning how to play them?
What makes learning guitar even more confusing is that everybody who learns seems quite happy to have taken the path that they took and, in hindsight, would not have done anything different. I would suggest that talking to friends who have already been through the learning side would probably be a good start. Did they learn to play by starting on chords? Or scales? How l about their abilities as a guitar player after a few years of fooling around in a non-structured, non-disciplined way?
Many guitarists have made their way by watching and talking to friends and making use of the free tabs on the internet. Choosing tabs should be a fairly stress-free job if you are guided by your personal musical tastes, but learning from friends could create a problem. If you have friends or family members who think they know a thing or two about playing the guitar, its possible that they may or may not be aware of their own limitations.
A guitar playing friend can show you how to play a chord or a riff, but they will have only limited ability to provide you with the guidance you need to chart your own guitar learning path and to judge your own progress.
If you do take the unstructured route for learning guitar, you can always take a lesson or two from a professional teacher just to make sure you haven’t acquired too many bad habits, and to help with steering you on the right course for your guitar music progress.
One experience you could do well to share with a guitar teacher is learning from a printed guitar tutor. If you choose one of the many good guitar lesson books, you already have a structured learning program. Sharing this learning with an experienced guitarist will allow him or her to add their own perspective to the information in the book.
