You’ve got your guitar and ready to start playing. To begin with, get comfortable with your guitar and try sitting with it resting on your right leg if you’re right handed, and on your left leg if your left handed. Using a guitar strap will help give more support. Now strum the strings with your rhythm hand and let them ring out. Pluck each string on its own and hear the sound. A standard guitar tuning has the strings E-A-D-G-B-E.

Then gently grip your fretting hand around the fretboard towards the “nut” of the guitar (the nut is the part that goes just before the head, where the strings begin to rest on) with your finger tip ends towards the fretboard.

Get used to hearing the sounds of your strings and strumming them open. You can tune your guitar using an app on your phone or a clip on tuner, you can also tune your guitar using the strings as a reference. See lesson one on the page beginenners guitar lessons on how to hold and tune your guitar.

The next step is to learn some chords- begin by learning G, C, D, Em, Am, A, D and E. Take time to get your fingers used to finding the chord shapes and making sure each note is nice and clean sounding.

It takes a lot of practice and time to learn the different chords. Your fingertips will get sore until your skin hardens. Don’t give up! Take a break for a day or two if you need to then get back to it. Short practice sessions every day will be better than one long practice session once a week. Focus on one thing you want to get better at, and do drills over and over again, until you get it. Yes it’s good to practice a variety of skills on guitar like chords, scales and ear training, but to get better on the guitar you really need to hone in on a specific goal and practice over and over again, to commit it to muscle memory. Here’s a video for beginners guitar on practicing chord changes-

If you would like to take your learning to the next level, check out my ebook “The Happy Guitarist” available on Gumroad and Patreon.