Beginner Guitar Lessons

When you begin on guitar, the most important thing to focus on is your fretting hand- whether you’re learning chords or picking out single notes. The first chords you should learn are A, D, E, G, C, Am and Em followed by F, Dm, B and Bm. It will also be good for you to start learning what the notes are on the fretboard, and an effective way to do this is to start playing scales- the Em pentatonic and C major scale in the open position are good scales to begin with.

Lesson 1– how to hold and tune the guitar. You can sit or stand with your guitar, a guitar strap will provide a little more support. To tune your guitar you can use a tuning app on your phone or a clip on tuner. This video lesson also shows you how to tune a guitar without a guitar tuner.

Lesson 3– How to play Em and D on guitar. When you can play G, C, Em and D you can play hundreds of songs! Em is a nice easy chord to play, D is a little trickier as you have to position three of your fingers on 3 strings, and only strum four strings- starting on the D string.

Lesson 5– Strumming patterns: the downstrokes and the down, down up strokes.

Lesson 7– Your first song! Wagon Wheel is an easy song to play on guitar, it has the chords G, C, D and Em.

Practice chord changes– So you’ve learned some chords, maybe played a song. Now it’s time to master those chord changes and the best way to do that is practice.

How to play the chords F and Dm

Lesson 2– How to play the chords G and C on guitar. G and C are some of the first chords you should learn on guitar. Many songs will have the G and C chords in them. They are completely different shapes. To begin with, take time to get your fingers used to finding the chord shapes.

Lesson 4– How to use a capo on the guitar. Some people think using a capo is “cheating” indeed I thought using a capo was an easy way out and stubbornly refused to use one for many years, until discovering the beauty of playing the same chord shapes higher up the fretboard- it really sounds nice!

Lesson 6– Em pentatonic scale. Practicing scales is a great way to improve your overall technique, strength and knowledge of the fretboard.

Lesson 8– How to play the chords A, Am and E. These are some of the most important chords to play on guitar and they sound great.

How to read guitar tab. You don’t need to read music to read guitar tab. The numbers represent what fret you need to play on, and the lines are the strings with the top line being the 1st string (thin E string)

How to play the chords B, Bm and B7