Strum This
A guide to playing the guitar
By Jacob Wilson, contributing writer
Posted on September 21, 2006

Have you dreamed of being a guitar god, playing like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, but never found the time to learn? Have you wanted to learn to play your favorite song, but didn’t want to pay for expensive lessons? Learning to play the guitar is a challenge, but it’s not as hard as you may think — and you don’t have to pay anybody to teach you. All you need is the right equipment, about 20 minutes of free time a day, Internet access and a little bit of patience to start on the path to mastering guitar.
           
Getting Ready
To start you’ll need a guitar, obviously. However, you probably shouldn’t go out and buy a brand new one until you get more comfortable and knowledgeable about guitars. Once you do find out what you like in a guitar, you can go out and spend as much money as you want on one but for now, try to borrow a friend’s guitar. If that doesn’t work you can either rent a guitar or buy a cheap one.
           
Once you have a guitar you need to find adequate seating. This is important because you’ll be spending about 20 minutes a day practicing and you want to be comfortable. You can’t sit on a chair with arms and play guitar, so you need to find a stool or armless chair of average height.

You’ll also need to get a few guitar picks. You can buy some at a local music shop — they’re very cheap.

The last thing you’ll need is that patience. This will be invaluable if you plan on sticking with it.

The Basics
First, you must hold the guitar correctly to play it correctly. If you’re right-handed, position the guitar on your right thigh so that its back rests against your stomach and chest and the thickest guitar string is uppermost. The neck of the guitar, the skinny part, should point straight out to your left. If you’re a left-handed person, you need to use the opposite and you’ll also need a guitar that is strung properly.

Once you’re comfortable with the guitar in your lap, get out your pick. You need to hold it in your right hand, between your thumb and pointer finger. Position your fingers so that they cross at right angles and the pick is pinched between the pads of each finger. Remember to make sure the pointed end of the pick is aimed at the strings. Try a few strums to get a feel for how firmly you need to hold the pick.

Now it’s time to concentrate on your left hand. You’ll be using your left hand to finger the strings and make actual chords and scales on the neck of the guitar. At first, it’s a good idea to just practice pressing down a single string with one finger and pick that string with your right hand. Once you’ve gotten a feel for how much pressure you need to use to produce a sound, you can start learning chords and scales. The easiest way to do this is to use some of the fantastic resources available online.

The Web site looknohands.com/chordhouse shows you what the fingering is for any chord. A good first chord to learn is G, so select G and take a look at the pictured guitar neck. To read the fingering chart, keep in mind that the strings shown on the left are the thickest, corresponding to the strings on your guitar nearest your face. The numbers shown represent your fingers, with 1 being your pointer finger, 2 (middle finger), 3 (ring finger) and 4 (pinky finger). Try a few different chords until you get used to playing them. For a few days you should stick to practicing those chords until you can strum them with ease.

Another thing you should practice every day is a scale. Scales are unlike chords in that you play only single notes at a time. There are many different scales with varying numbers of notes, but for now just think of them as exercise for your fingers. They are good practice for getting both your hands used to moving around on the strings. The website guitar.about.com has some helpful tips as well as graphic representations of scales. Practice a scale everyday as well as the chords you learned, remembering to try new ones so you get comfortable with a lot of them.

After a few weeks of this, you should be pretty comfortable and confident on the guitar. All you need now is to learn some songs. An easy and free way to do this is to read tablature online. Tablature is a format used by guitar players for writing out and reading guitar melodies and songs. The Web site guitar.about.com has a nice tutorial on reading tabs (which is short for tablature) and once you’ve gotten that down, you can use any search engine to find tabs to your favorite songs. A good site to find tabs is harmonycentral.com.