It’s never easy to find your talent – but if you’re musical and you dedicate yourself, you can learn to play guitar like the ghost of Hendrix himself. It takes practise, determination, and a little talent, but if you work hard and stick at it, guitar success is waiting to be taken.

How do you start playing like a pro? Listen up and our expert team will tell you.

9 Steps to Guitar Playing Success

If you want to play guitar but don’t know how, you are in the right place. Here are our nine step instructions to guitar playing success…

1 – Choose your Weapon

The guitar you choose is important. If you are small bodied, a huge bodied acoustic is going to be really hard to reach around and play. Similarly, if you have small hands, a wide fret board (that’s the bit with the strings) is going to be impossible.

Additionally, acoustic guitars are traditionally the hardest to play. Learn on an acoustic and you will be able to play everything else eventually.

2 – Limber up!

This is where lessons come in handy. Learning stretches will help open your hand up to create the shape of the chords on the fret. When you play, you have your ‘good’ hand strumming and your off hand learning the chord shapes. Stretches help you reach those notes, you can find some good ones courtesy of Web MD.

3 – Reading Music

You won’t be able to play anything if you don’t know how to read the notes off the page. Sometimes, they will be marked as chords, more often (and particularly in the early learning stages) you will find guitar TAB and chord diagrams. These are representations of the frets on paper. WikiHow have a decent guide on this.

4 – Get to Know your Guitar

Spend some time with it, treat it like your best buddy, take it to dinner and buy it wine… not really, but you get the idea. Try out a few notes, see how strumming works, and pinch in single strings on the fret board to get an idea of sound and range.

5 – Starting Point 1 = Riffs

You might find it easiest to ‘feel out’ some well-known or favoured guitar riffs. This is an acceptable starting point and, so long as you can read the notes, it should help you place some of the more basic chords.

6 – Starting Point 2 = Basic Chords

Or you might want to start by learning the most basic chords. When you first learn guitar you realise that most well-known rock songs are made of the same handful of chords. If you can master those half-dozen chords, you will master most popular music.

7 – Strumming Patterns

Strumming isn’t easy. You think it’s going to be, but the reality is that it can take longer than learning the chords. Practise the two separately and you will see bigger growth.

8 – Designated Practise

You won’t get better if you don’t practise[i]. For some people this means sitting their guitar in an area where they will pick it up often. For others, it means a dedicated time and space to practise in.

9 – Finally – Keep At It

Good guitar playing doesn’t come overnight. You need to keep at it. Practise those chords you fine most difficult every day and after a week you will have them. Repetition is the key to success. You can worry about creativity once you know how to play.

Still Stuck?

Still feeling a little lost when it comes to learning guitar? That’s fine. You just need guitar lessons Nottingham to help out. Even if you are not based in Nottingham city you can always get your lessons via Skype. Go on. Even Hendrix had to start somewhere.