Playing the guitar is one of the most useful and versatile skills you can have. In fact it has even been proven to increase your intelligence. If you either love playing the guitar, or would love to be able to learn, you have come to the right place!

Of course, before anything else, it is of utmost important that you have a decent guitar. Don’t make a very common mistake made by many others and buy yourself a cheap guitar. In general, the cheaper they are, the harder they are to play, and the harder they are on your fingers, not to mention a less superior sound. Hours of playing on a cheap guitar can make a mess of your fingers, including bleeding and a very unpleasant experience. So don’t let anything like this dampen your determination! Spend at least a few hundred dollars, and avoid nylon strings if you’re going acoustic.

Now first of all I must stress that technique, or the way you learn is far more important than learning a whole bunch of songs initially. As time goes by, you will easily forget songs that you’ve learnt. But by learning the core principles of guitar playing, you will eventually just be able to play any song without even having to look at the tab, or sheet music. Don’t get disheartened when you can’t do everything you’d like to do. Before you know it, it will come. Just keep it simple, and if a song you’d like to learn how to play looks to hard, just move on and come back in a few weeks time, you’ll surprise yourself.

There a many parts of the guitar which you need to know about and use as well. The frets (metal bars across the neck) are a half note each. So for example to go from "E" to "F", that’s a distance of two frets. Each of the strings on the guitar are five half notes apart (except for the "G" and "B" strings, which is four), starting at "E" (lowest), going up to A, D, G, B, and "e" (highest). Your left hand will be taking care of this. Your right hand is used to pick and strum the strings. While picking, rest your wrist on the bridge (where the strings are tied off at the base), and this will help you to remember where the strings are without having to look at them.

When you first start learning to play songs, you need a tab (sheet music) to read. Either buy this from a music shop, but I recommend downloading them off the net, there’s plenty of free sites. (E.g. Ultimate Guitar). Learning how to read tabs is easy. Look at the string you want to play on the tab, then press with you finger firmly between the two frets. If for example it is a "3" on the "A" string, hold down the second lowest string "A" right after the 3rd fret. Also try practice changing between different strings and frets in a continuous pattern to help your fingers get a feel for the strings, and also to increase your speed.

Learning to play chords is another great way to start. Print yourself up a sheet of all the basic chords (combination of different strings to create a key sound) Learn these off by heart and practice for hours increasing your successful chord changes and the speed. In fact most popular songs commonly use only about 10 or so main chords: A, Am, B, Bm, C, D, E, Em, F, and G are among the most common. Even by playing just these few chords, there are literally thousands of songs that use just these. This is mainly done on the acoustic guitar, but is very easy for beginners to pick up, and within weeks or even days you could be playing simple songs almost flawlessly.

If you want to learn the electric guitar, main difference is you do not generally strum chords, rather, playing power chords. These are usually three of the lower strings played together (the lowest string played being one whole note lower than the other two). These are also based primarily on normal chords any way, but just sound better on the electric. Once you progress, you will learn many other more advanced techniques, for example, playing scales, palm muting, distortion, etc. As well as numerous styles such as metal, blues, classical, etc.

So… If you would like to turbo charge the time it takes for you to become a pro, you must check out this online training system! Whether you are a skilled player yourself, or never even picked up a guitar before, then this is for you. It contains over 20 hours of video guitar lessons from numerous guitar instructors, and drastically reduces the difficult and somewhat dreaded learning curve period.