How to Play Guitar for Beginners

In this tutorial, I would be teaching people who want to play the guitar how to play and what you need to do to get started. I will describe the structure of the guitar, teach how to tune the guitar, how to hold the guitar, how to shape the chords with your hand, and how to strum the guitar. Putting these steps together, people should be able to get a good start on how to play the guitar.

A guitar(look at the website guitarcenter.com), a capo(a device that clamps down across the fingerboard at a particular fret on a guitar), and if the guitar doesn't come with a tuner you would need a phone.

The picture here is a prime example of how a guitar is structured. But the most important parts to know is the neck, which is the long part of the guitar. The neck contains frets and it's where you will be pressing down on the strings to make your chord shapes. Next, we have the head, which is where you can tune the guitar, and the body, where you will do most of the strumming. The strings from the top of the guitar to the bottom are EADGBE. An easy way to remember this is "Eddy Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddy"

If your guitar comes with an automatic tuner built in the guitar then perfect, but if it doesn't then you would need a phone to tune the guitar. First, let's take into account the guitar with a built-in tuner, with this kind of tuner when you strum a string there should be an indicator lighting green or red. If it is red that means it is not tuned, and if it lights green it is in tune. If it lights red, you would need to go to the head of the guitar and twist it either right or left depending on what the tuning is. If you need to tune the guitar higher you would twist the pegs to make the string tighter and vice versa. If you have a phone you can download a guitar tuning app, just search guitar tuner on the AppStore or Google store and download it. From there, the app will guide you step by step on how to tune the guitar.

To hold a guitar, if you are right-handed, you would want the waist of the guitar(see step 1 for what the waist of the guitar is) resting on your right knee and if you're left-handed buy a left-handed guitar and do the same thing but with your left knee. Next, you would want to take your right arm and rest it on the top side of the guitar. Make sure that when you are sitting to keep your back straight, you don't wanna be hunched over the guitar because your back will start to hurt.

The image above contains the basic chords and their shapes. WARNING, you will feel pain on the tips of your fingers whenever you are pressing down on the strings. This is okay and it is perfectly normal, after a while the pain will start to go away and you will build callus on your fingertips. So looking at the picture we can see that the lines with black dots on them have numbers. These numbers are associated with your fingertips, so 1 would be your index finger, two would be your middle finger, three would be your ring finger and 4 would be your pinky finger, and 5 would be your thumb. The lines on the charts going from left to right are the chords, EADGBE in this exact order. So look at these pictures one by one and copy what it is showing. Strumming is easy, just strum the strings on the body part of the guitar and just strum in a downward motion with your nail.

Once you are comfortable with these chords, slowly but surely practice steps 4 over and over again until you memorize the chords. Once you memorize the chords try playing them one after the other to help transition from one chord to another. After you are comfortable with the chords and transitioning from one chord to another, boom you have just learned the very basics of how to play the guitar. Continue to practice with shaping the chords and strumming. After that, if you're comfortable enough playing the guitar and playing the chords, you can look up a YouTube video to learn your favorite songs.

Start learning your favorite songs and impress people with your guitar skills! Thanks for looking at this tutorial!