Learn How to Play Guitar

By Vanisya

“Van, please teach me how to play guitar” I heard that more than I teach anyone how to play guitar. Why? Because every time I want to teach them, they would say “What song that’s easy to play?”. And they asked me that with their fingertips that are still soft. Why does that matter you may ask.

Take a look at guitarists’ fingertips, never soft, hard (unless they haven’t played guitar for a long time). Calluses help guitarists to press strings, making it less painful. We have to press the strings real hard to make it sounds right, that’s why you need calluses to play guitar.

So now you know what’s the first step to play guitar. We can get calluses by keep pressing the strings to cause stress on the skin of our fingertips. It hurts in the beginning, but once the skins get thicker you’ll feel less pain. You can get calluses by learning basic chords such as G, Am, D, Dm, etc. To make it easy, focus on a few chords.

Learning basic chords is gone, calluses appear. Now the next step is to try to switch chords back and forth. What you need here is consistency and pain resistance. And voila! You’ve reached the last step, now you can try a song that requires basic chords for the whole song. 

So, if you want to learn how to play guitar for a long term, you need those baby steps and never forget that consistency is the key. Apply those steps and you finally know how to play guitar. Good luck!