Learning to Play Guitar Well: From Beginner to Master
In order to learn to play guitar well you need to start off on the right foot. Often times people just starting out are to eager to learn their favorite tunes fast, so they skip over the important (yet sometimes boring) stuff that will allow them to grow as a guitar player later on.
How can you avoid this pitfall that many beginner guitar players fall into? My suggestion is to take some time up front when deciding how you’re going to play, and decide right now that you’re not going to take the short cut to just learning tablature, instead you have the desire to learn to read music, understand guitar theory, and plan scales.
Ok, so you’ve decided then that you do want to learn to play guitar the right way, the first time. So now where do you go from here? Well there are two avenues you can walk down. The one that’s been used for the last 30-40 years is the conventional private guitar lesson.
You enroll either at a local conservatory or look for a private guitar instructor that gives lessons in your home town. This method has been working for years, how ever as our attention span shortens, and we move further and further into the age of instant gratification for some private guitar lessons won’t teach you fast enough.
Enter Learn at Home Guitar Lessons
There’s a new breed of online and dvd guitar lessons that designed specifically to replace the private guitar instructor and allow you to learn on your own without the aid of a teacher.
My personal preference is for guitar lesson dvds but that’s because they are easily watched on my TV rather then my PC (not to take anything away from online guitar lesson videos). There’s a slew of these products to choose from, and similar to a good movie they’re not all created equal.
You can read about my top pick for a guitar lesson dvd course here in my Learn and master guitar review, but I’ll give you a brief outline of the content of this course now.
Why Learn and Master Guitar
This learn guitar course is designed to take the beginner from how to hold, tune, and strum the guitar to an intermediate player in about a year. The program consists of 10 dvds with two lessons on each disc. I know what you’re thinking, how can 20 lessons last me a year, that’s my next point.
Unlike private guitar lessons this program is structured where each lesson takes a varying amount of time to master. You first watch the dvd lesson, then refer to the printed manual included for accompanying lesson content and practice instructions. Here it will list how long it should take you to master this part of the course. Some parts will be one week while others can be 3 or 4.
If you’re serious about learning to play guitar well I have been unable to find a learn guitar dvd that will teach you as well as Learn and Master Guitar.