Monday, May 9, 2011

Teach Yourself Guitar

By Chris Lake


The approach to learning the guitar is to take lessons for a professional guitar tutor. This works great for people, but some prefer the freedom that comes from teaching themselves. Just how to go about this will be explained in the rest of this article.

It's always good, when learning any new skill, to set yourself to work towards, both long and short term. This helps you to focus your learning time, and by breaking things down into small, you won't feel so overwhelmed by all the information you'll have to absorb. It is a good idea to figure out what you want to achieve when teaching yourself guitar - do you want to play in a band, or write you own music, for example? Having a set goal in mind will give you the motivation to keep learning and improving, as well as making it easier to chart your progress, and see how well you are doing.

You will need to have some learning resources at your disposal for you to work from when trying to teach yourself guitar. Traditionally, this would comprise mostly of books, and many self taught guitarists have, over the years, amassed quite impressive collections of these. These days, however, you have more options. The internet and new media offer an enormous amount of information for you to delve into, both paid for and free. Finding it is as easy as typing into Google, and the resulting internet sites, containing videos, audio, lessons, and more, will be enough to keep you occupied for months on end.

If you want to make good progress it is vital that you take a logical approach to learning. You should begin by learning the basics, and move on once you have perfected them. You should never bite of more than you can chew. If you take on too much too soon, you will not progress as well as you should.

One of the best things about learning on your own is that you wont necessarily be tied to the conventional ways of learning. You can be as experimental and original as you like when it comes to thinking up ways of playing things, and this will lead to you having a very individual style, which will mark you out from other guitarists. A lot of the best guitarists in history taught themselves, and a large part of what makes them so great is the unique sound and style they've created, which is often a consequence of not having learnt in the conventional way. However, it is advisable to also be familiar with the more conventional ways of playing, as this will make you more of a versatile guitarist.

Often, when people teach themselves guitar, they struggle to find the discipline needed to make good progress. You need to ensure that you keep yourself motivated, and put in the practice. Once you start seeing results, this should encourage you to practice even more, and you will continue to improve. The main goal in all this, aside from getting good, is to have fun whilst you learn. This will also help keep you motivated.

So that winds up this article about teaching yourself guitar. I hope it has made a few things clearer for anyone thinking about taking it up.




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