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I’m going to sound like a school teacher saying this but you shouldn’t overlook those simple guitar lessons for beginners that sometimes look as if they’re going to be too easy. I admit that there’s no comparison between them and cranking up the volume of an electric guitar and straight away belting out a few riffs. That’s why so many new guitarists don’t give learning the basics much thought.

I’ve just learned a song, so I probably don’t even need to go back to basics anymore, or this is so much more enjoyable than learning the basics, so I’ll just keep on doing this. It’s easy to get lured into learning bits of songs from friends and instead of just spending a little time on learning the basics. By basics, I’m talking about things as simple as holding the guitar properly or what to look out for in hand positions etc.   The more ‘bitty’ the way you learn, the less likely it is that you’ll see it through because you’ll end up glossing over all the early lessons and learning how everything fits together. It’s a bit like learning that 2 x 2 is 4, but without knowing how to count; it will catch up with you at some point. 

Your guitarist friends are only too keen to show you how to half-play a few songs and it feels good to make noises that you can recognize. When you get into this trend, there are a couple of issues that pop up.

I’m going to sound like a school teacher saying this but you shouldn’t overlook those simple guitar lessons for beginners that sometimes look as if they’re going to be too easy. I admit that there’s no comparison between them and cranking up the volume of an electric guitar and straight away belting out a few riffs. That’s why so many new guitarists don’t give learning the basics much thought.

Your guitarist friends are only too keen to show you how to half-play a few songs and it feels good to make noises that you can recognize. When you get into this trend, there are a couple of issues that pop up, because:

• You’ve skipped the basics and gone straight to the good stuff
• You don’t know what you’ve missed out on and what effect they would have had

When you miss out the first steps to becoming a guitarist and start a little further along, you won’t notice any problems to begin with, but when the honeymoon period ends, it will be quite difficult to find things that you can play and learn quickly.  With a set structure to get you through the ‘dull’ early stages quickly, you will know how good you are supposed to be at each stage and what you should be playing.   When you learn as you go, progression is usually slower and less thorough meaning, that you are:

• In danger of hitting ‘the wall’
• Easily frustrated by what you can’t do
• Much more likely to give up
• Going to sell yourself short

Something which heavily influences whether someone will stick with the guitar is how you start learning.  These ‘dull’ and simple guitar lessons for beginners do so much more than you realise, so please use them. They help set you up to become a decent guitarist much faster, instead of becoming one of the many that lose interest and in a year or so probably won’t touch a guitar again.

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