Learning your first songs on the guitar should give you a sense of achievement. You can express yourself through strumming, picking and singing your songs. Of course your first songs will be easy but they will also inspire you to take your guitar playing further. You will see that you can achieve so much more by learning fingerpicking, more intricate strumming patterns or barre chords.

Ideal Beginner Guitar Songs

It will be useful to look at the qualities that make an easy song ideal for beginner guitar players.

• There are hundreds of songs to learn on guitar covering pop, country, rock, folk, blues, Celtic or any other genre you can think of. Just because you are new to the guitar should not mean you are stuck with learning boring or old-fashioned songs.
• Typical inclusions in any list of easy guitar songs for beginners contain only a few simple chords. These chords include C major, D major, D minor, A minor, E minor, and G major. Usually these songs do not include barre chords, except for F major played with a half barre.



• Your beginners songs should not only be easy to learn but familiar to your audience. You will get more feedback if the song they are hearing is one that they know and feel relaxed about commenting on your performance.

Song Structures

Fortunately many popular songs have similar structures.

• One simple song form which is used a lot in popular music is the “verse-chorus” form. La Bamba by Richie Valens is an example.
• Another popular type of song is the 12 bar blues form. Listening to Little Red Rooster by The Rolling Stones or Sweet Home Chicago by Robert Johnson will show you the simplicity of this style.
• The 32 bar ballad is also used widely. Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis is an example of this form.

To hammer home the point about popular music being less complicated than it looks, here is video showing how similar many songs are:

Easy Guitar Songs

Now for a list of easy songs to learn on guitar. Horse With No Name by America is easy because you really only need one chord, but do not expect all songs to be so easy. Many songs only require three chords. Bald Headed Woman by The Kinks is an early example of a typical three-chord song. To give you an idea of what can be done with a few chords, here is a video featuring many songs using the same four chords:

Here are some more easy guitar songs to learn:

Avril Lavigne: Complicated, I Will Be, I’m With You
Boys Like Girls: Two Is Better Than One
Coldplay: Clocks, Viva La Vida
David Cook: Always Be My Baby, Time Of My Life
Daughtry: Home, Life After You, No Surprise, Over You, What About Now
Eric Clapton: Wonderful Tonight
Green Day: When September Ends
Howie Day: Collide
Jason Mraz: I’m Yours, Lucky
Lady Gaga: Bad Romance, Poker Face
Lifehouse: You And Me
Ronan Keating: When You Say Nothing At All
Oasis: Wonderwall
Owl City: Fireflies
Plain White Ts: 1 2 3 4
Taylor Swift: Fifteen, Love Story, Teardrops On My Guitar, You Belong With Me
The Calling: Go Wherever You Will Go
The Script: The Man Who Cant Be Moved
U2: With Or Without You

Easy Guitar Songs for Beginners Using Full Chords

Tab versus music notation

The debate over tabs versus sheet music tends to polarize guitarists into two distinct groups. One group has learned to read music, usually when they first learned to play, and therefore enjoy the benefits of being able to learn any song or instrumental by reading the sheet music. The other group learns by putting in hours listening to recordings, watching other guitarists, and experimenting with their own musical ideas. These guitarists keep a body of ideas inside themselves. These ideas give direction to which pieces these guitarists learn as well as governing how they improvise and write new songs.

Either group can learn to improvise solos or write songs according to the time and effort they put into their music, but the guitarists who can read music have a greater range of teaching materials they can use to broaden their capabilities.

Music Notation

Music notation is a means of communication for musicians. In a perfect world, all musicians, no matter which instrument they play, would be able to instantly play any piece of music put in front of them. If they are members of a band, each person would understand the part he plays from reading the music.

Guitar sheet music tells the whole story when it comes to a piece of music. From sheet music a guitar player can tell where the instruments play together or take solos, and where sections of the music are repeated. For simple melody lines such as those found in pop, rock and blues, sheet music tells where on the guitar fretboard the notes are played, and the time signature. It also tells the player how long each note lasts.

Where music notation fails

A lot of guitar music is played in alternate tunings. As the strings on the guitar can be tuned individually, many different musical effects can be achieved by departing from the standard guitar tuning of E A D G B E. Sight reading a piece written in a non-standard tuning is very difficult because the guitarist has learned to sight read based on standard tuning. For reading pieces in any alternate tuning, tab is easier.

Advantages of guitar tabs

Guitar tablature is a picture of the guitar strings. The names of the strings are listed down the left side of the tab, and the fret numbers are listed along the strings, telling you where to put your fingers. Using tab for guitar playing needs no special training, which means you can start hearing yourself playing the song right away. Standard musical notation tells you which notes to play, but for every note there is a choice of positions on the fretboard. Tablature eliminates this decision for the newbie guitar player, making learning a little faster.

What tablature does not tell you

Most of the basic information about a piece of guitar music can be written in tab but there is no way to represent note duration. Tab is only good if the guitarist knows how the song sounds. This means that the guitar player can tell from the tab where to put his fingers to play the notes, but he must have the tune in his head in order to put them together.

This tab shows where to put your fingers on the fourth string in order to play the riff from Smoke on the Water:

click the pic to see the full size image

Using TuxGuitar

There is a technology-based solution to the problem of rendering note values in guitar tablature. Tab used to be only available in the form of hand drawn or typed text documents, but now it is possible to produce tabs using a guitar tab maker. There are several of these guitar tab software programs – notable ones are Powertab, Tabledit and GuitarPro. Most will import tab written as a text document (often referred to as ASCII) or midi files, and convert them to tabs. TuxGuitar is a free guitar editor which imports files made in other editors as well as midis and ASCII tabs.

click the pic to see the full size image

You can download TuxGuitar here.

The time factor

Learning to read music does take time. Getting to know the names of the notes and how they relate to the dots on the page needs some study. Learning to read tabs for guitar can be done in less than half an hour.

Learning to read music is not essential in order to learn to play guitar. Tommy Emmanuel, Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton are three great guitarists who never learned to read music. These players succeeded in music by the force of their enthusiasm for playing. They learned to play by ear, and other musicians played with them because of their flair for guitar playing. An article on Jimi Hendrix’s early life and music career gives an insight into how a guitarist with an individualistic approach and an overwhelming devotion to playing guitar can attract the interest of audiences and other musicians.

Many guitar teachers will insist on teaching their students music theory and music notation. This is because theory and music reading prepare the student for any challenges he or she may meet in music. This includes working with other musicians in a band or recording studio.

Some Facts on Guitar Tab and Sheet Music

Correcting mistakes

This is where having a teacher helps. Your guitar teacher can correct mistakes you would otherwise not see. He can help you with placing your left hand fingers so that your chords are not muffled. Most of all, he can give you reassurance when you think you are the worst guitar student ever. Most guitar teachers will have the experience to help you with your own individual problems such as crooked fingers or bad posture.

Having a teacher who can guide you through the learning process will help you take care of the emotional and mental hurdles on the way to being a guitar player. Having a course of lessons where you are required to learn theory as well as practice chords and scales will keep you too busy to get bogged down in negative thoughts. A teacher also knows all the easy guitar songs for beginners to learn with, and can select the ones that will help your progress.

Free online guitar lessons

If you do not have a teacher, the free guitar lesson videos on YouTube will help with learning how to play guitar chords, and other aspects of guitar playing but your own efforts will also you grow a healthy approach to learning guitar. Having more than one goal to work on at any time will help. If you are learning new songs, you will need to work on chord shapes, and changing from one chord to the next. You could also be working on learning the notes on the guitar neck. You can learn where the seven natural notes are found on the fretboard. Of course there are also the sharps and flats, but once you can locate the naturals, the accidentals will find themselves.

Struggling against discomfort

A big issue right at the beginnning of learning to play guitar is the physical discomfort. Your left hand fingers will be feeling tender until they develop calluses on the tips, and it will be frustrating working changing chords. All of these problems just disappear if you practice regularly and try not to rush. The good news is that seeing progress in one area of practice will give you the optimism to help you through the other difficulties you are having.

How Long Does It Take To Learn Guitar?

What Guitar Tabs Represent

Tabs for guitar consist of six lines which represent the strings on a guitar. The letters running down the left side are the notes of the open strings in standard guitar tuning. The term “open string” means the string is played without any left-hand fingers stopping the strings at the frets. The first string which is the thinnest string is often designated with a lowercase “e” and the sixth string is shown with a capital “E”.

e——————————

B——————————

G——————————

D——————————

A——————————

E——————————

Tablature shows the guitar as you see it in this picture . . .

. . . with the first string – the thinnest string at the top. Numbers are placed along the lines to show you where to put your fingers. Here is the tab for the theme from the 1950s TV series, Peter Gunn:

e——————————

B——————————

G——————————

D——————————

A——————————

E–0–0–2–0–3–0–5–4——

The numbers you see along the sixth string indicate where you put your fingers to play the notes. This tab tells you that you are going to be playing some notes on the open E string, as well as the notes made by stopping the string at the second, third, fifth and fourth frets.

Guitar Tabs and Fingering

You will notice that guitar tabs do not tell you which fingers to use to play the notes comfortably. For a beginner guitar player it is important to know which fingers to use when playing so that the piece flows and you do not stress your left hand too much. When playing Peter Gunn you can play the notes at the second and third frets using the second and third fingers, and the notes at the fourth and fifth frets using the third and pinky fingers.

Here is a picture showing the left hand fingers as they are usually named in guitar tutorials:

Most tab editing software shows the fingering as well as the notes.

If you have learnt music theory, you will know that the notes are E E F# E G E A G#, and all the notes are eighth notes. If you do not know music, you will need to hear the tune in order to make sense of the notes in the tab. Here is a clip of the tune:

Now you can hear the tune in your head, you can give the notes the correct values as you play them. If you are using TuxGuitar or another editing program, the editor’s built-in midi player lets you hear how the tune is supposed to sound.

How to Read Guitar Tabs

Having set the metronome at a speed that you can cope with, practice at that speed until it no longer makes you feel uncomfortable. Once you have reached this point, increase the tempo a little so that you have the feeling that you are putting all of your mental and physical energy into the effort of playing while keeping the beat. Once you have found this stage of your playing, make this the goal for your practice. Forget about playing at a comfortable speed; find the place that makes you stretch yourself a little.

There is no Such Thing as Steady Progress

When you learn the guitar, finding your ideal tempo is not a matter of progressing from one speed to the next. You will find that you often need to go back to a slow speed. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because you could play at 200 beats per minute yesterday, you do not need to go back to 80 beats today. Teaching the body new skills means learning how the body works. Your body has its own way of doing things which does not necessarily conform to your mind’s expectations.

Going to the trouble of learning to do your guitar practice with a metronome may seem like too much hard work, but however hard it is, you only go through it once. If you have the skills that disciplined practice gives you, they cannot be take away from you. If it is no longer a hassle to play using a metronome, you have the freedom and the knowledge to know when to use it and when not to use it to help you become the kind of player you want to be.

The Best Way to Learn How to Play Guitar Fast

How the Metronome Helps Advance Your Guitar Playing

As a beginner guitarist who practices with a metronome, you will acquire several abilities as your playing progresses:

• Strumming, picking, changing chords, and keeping to the beat will all develop alongside one another
• You will find you can play along with other musicians
• You will be able to focus on your goals every time you practice
• You will be able to see clearly which aspects of your playing you need to pay attention to
• It will help you to practice at a speed your body can handle, while laying the foundation for gradually increasing your speed

The metronome helps you to focus your attention. Guitar students who do not use a metronome will allow their attention to wander during practice time. This makes it difficult to learn new material while at the same time working on the quality of your playing.

Playing along with the ticking of the metronome is a new motor skill which will take a few days to get used to. As with all new skills, the more you practice, the quicker the results will appear.

The obstacle most people find when they first try to practice with the help of a metronome is that it is an “extra thing” to work on, as well as playing chords or scales without muffling the notes. Surely it would be simpler to focus all your attention on the playing, and leave keeping the beat for later? Not true. Dividing your attention always helps your mind, body and feelings to learn new activities. Once you have the knack of using the metronome, you will be qualified to decide when not to use it.

Tips on Using a Metronome for the Beginner Guitar Player

“If you’re just starting out on the guitar, it’s important to find one that’s either really cheap or really flashy.”

“Cultivate poor posture techniques early on, so that they become a learned behavior.”

“Practice irregularly.”

“Start playing the guitar really fast before you’ve learned how to fret and change chords properly.”

“Give up when your fingers start to hurt.”

“Assume that you can learn how to play the guitar without anybody’s help.”

“When you discover that changing chords is too hard and that a couple of week’s worth of time investment hasn’t made you sound like Clapton, make sure to give up immediately and never touch the guitar again.”
Assuming you can learn how to play the guitar without help should be close to the heart of anyone who wants to learn to play for free, but the author of this article, Jonathan Dewbre, who does not appear to be a guitar teacher has hit the nail on the head on many points.

Increasing the speed and accuracy of your guitar playing is not possible if your body is tense. Learning to play guitar is not just a matter of spending time hunched over an instrument. You will need to pay attention to HOW you play.

If you are not used to working with the tensions in your body, a good start would be to simply stop what you are doing and check for any tension anywhere. You could use the timer on your phone or computer to remind you, say, at fifteen minute intervals, just to ask yourself where you are feeling tension.

If you feel that there is a buildup of tension in any area of your body, simply try to adjust your posture, rather than trying to eliminate the tension by letting your arms go limp, or some similar technique. If you like, you could try shaking and stretching to get the tension out.

By adjusting your posture I mean making sure your body is not twisted, your back is straight. Keeping your back straight is a matter of pivoting your upper body on the bones of your butt until you feel your back is straight without being tense. If you find you are continually assuming a slumped posture, try using cushions to make your pelvis lean forward slightly so your back is straight.

Here is a video detailing the advantages of maintaining good posture:

Of course, you will need to work on your posture in conjunction with your guitar. There are a lot of factors at work here: how you hold the instrument when you are sitting; do you need to adjust your position so you don’t crouch or slump; if you play standing up, is your strap so low that the guitar is difficult to reach.

You could stretch your neck, shoulders and back before you begin your guitar practice and again when your time is up.

Adjusting the posture of the whole body is not always necessary. Here is a video by bassist Gary Willis on paying attention to finger pressure as you practice.

If you are having difficulties with pain or tension due to guitar playing, keep a limit on your practice time. Many guitar players would love to organize their lives so they could practice for three, four or six hours a day, but if your body doesn’t like the idea, then stick to one or two hours.

Here is a link to a couple of videos by guitarist and teacher, Justin Rothberg showing how to use both left and right hand for guitar playing.

Learning to play guitar without damaging your body

For instance you could play by the clock for a week; no matter how you feel, put the guitar down when your allotted practice time is up. See how THAT feels! Or if you usually use a plectrum try going fingerstyle for a couple of days. Or vice versa. A change is as good as a breath of fresh air.

Listen To Yourself On Tape. Whether the surprise you get when you hear it is pleasant or otherwise, listening to a recording of yourself usually gives you something to work with!

Find New Exercises Scales, finger strength exercises, whatever. You can always find something new in this area on the internet.

Listen To Different Music. You might have to really force yourself to do this. If you usually listen to rock and blues, try some classical or Celtic music.

Exploring new avenues of interest might not turn up something you actually LIKE but what we all need is to give ourselves a little shake now and then.

Tips on learning how to play guitar

All us creative types know that if you are going to compose music you are going to need to have a close relationship with a lawyer. You see, when you start composing songs, that’s your intellectual property and ain’t nobody goin’ to meddle with it. Nosiree Bob. If any other creative musical person publishes someting that distantly resembles your original composition, that is your cue to have their kneecaps removed by hired goons and then use the legal system to squeeze their money out of them until they look like those clergymen of days gone by in the catacombs of Rome.

Now, back in the 1800′s intellectual property was not recognized as the cash cow that it is today. So when two ladies named Mildred and Patty Hill wrote a pleasant little ditty called “Good Morning To All”, they stood by and watched as various random mangy varmints changed their song to “Happy Birthday To You”. They probably even thought it was a kind of sweet idea.

YouTube has many Happy Birthday videos, so here is one in more or less the same key as the one I posted. The language the guy in the video is speaking is a version of English spoken only in New Zealand.

Happy Birthday Chords And Tabs

If you want to continue to grow as a guitarist, you will need to find areas of guitar playing where you can improve. You probably have some kind of basic goals concerning acquiring advanced technique or the kind of sound you want to get from the instrument.

Even if your basic goal is about sounding like a certain guitar player you can translate that general goal into which scales you need to learn and whether you should be devoting a lot of practice time to power chords or alternate picking, You do this by watching the artist you want to emulate and discovering the basics of his technique and the source of his sound.

Next, you will discover areas you need to work on because you are not very good at them. For instance, if you don’t like playing barre chords you might need to devote extra practice time to find out why you have trouble with them and how you can improve.

So much for discovering your own individual needs and weaknesses, in the next post we will look at some general areas of guitar playing that can be included in guitar practice sessions.

First – the general rules:
ALWAYS TUNE THE GUITAR BEFORE PRACTICING
ALWAYS USE A METRONOME
ALWAYS KEEP THE GUITAR OUT OF ITS CASE AND WITHIN REACH

Here is a video lesson on the preparation necessary for practicing electric guitar:

If desire is the most important part of learning to play the guitar, concentration is the most important part of guitar practice. Thirty minutes of focused practice is better than, two hours of normal practice, or just fooling around as so many of us do. Many people are discouraged when they are told how much time they must put into practice. But in reality, you don’t have to practice all the time to be a good guitar player.

It’s not that you shouldn’t take the time to play around, but if you want to improve quickly, you must keep playing your guitar and practicing guitar as two distinct concepts.
There are guitar exercises that help your muscles stay loose. Here is a video featuring a general warm-up exercise:

If you want more guitar exercises for your practice time here’s another dexterity exercise and some lead playing exercises..

If you want to learn how to play guitar, it isn’t the amount of time you give to practice, it’s the level of quality of the practice that makes a difference.

When you play guitar, play to enjoy yourself, play for an audience.

When you practice guitar, concentrate on the aim you’re trying to accomplish. Work on the objectives that you would like to carry out. Focus on one item and you are rather more likely to get it done effectively.

Don’t get the wrong idea. When you are working out your guitar practice routine, it does not follow that you can always achieve more in less time. Your body, mind and feelings still need the hours of practice to learn the muscular, mental and emotional habits associated with expressing yourself through the guitar. All virtuoso guitar players went through a time of practicing five, ten or more hours per day.

But for a guitar practice schedule it DOES matter how concentrated your practice is. Can you truly be centered on one goal for two hours? It’s quality and not volume of practice that wins the day. If you want to practice for two hours a day, then it is better to practice in short bursts of about fifteen to thirty minutes. You can deviate it based on what you feel like undertaking, but try not to practice for extended periods in one sitting. Take breaks during practicing. Just experiment and enjoy the fun with your guitar and chill out before you begin concentrating on practice once more.

First principle of guitar practice – concentrate on some riff, scale or chord change. Work on it every day until you’ve got it down. Then put it in your notebook or practice schedule so you’ll go back and refresh your familiarity and muscle memory with it often.

They may not admit it, but alot of people sit for hours a day working on some piece or other, then the next day something else takes their fancy, and the next day something else again. This might not sound so bad, but for some reason this unfocused approach to guitar practice goes hand in hand with a lack of self awareness when carrying out a physical regime. Being all over the place when you’re trying to harness the energy of the body will only lead to problems.

If you don’t take note of HOW you go about your practice, it’s not going to matter WHAT you do. If you try to play fast using your head instead of allowing your body to tell you how fast it can go, you are going to end up in pain the next day. Not just in the hands or fingers, but in the neck, arms, head, back, whatever you’ve got. You can try to play through this self inflicted agony, and maybe you’ll achieve some competency on the guitar, but you might also put yourself in the hospital.

Make your practice projects small. Make them things you can practice forwards, then backwards, then fast, then slow, then rest for a while by doing something else.

How fast do you want to play? Lets say you want to play a riff. You can hear it in your head. Don’t lose that sense of the ideal speed you’re aiming for. Now play it at the speed your hands can handle comfortably. It won’t be even. It’ll start and stop. Don’t become caught up in whether you’re succeeding or failing. Don’t get too analytical till you know`what you’re doing.

It is essential that you have a meaning or definition in your own private thoughts of “practicing” the guitar and “playing” the guitar. This will certainly continue to keep you targeted and permit you to achieve your objectives as a guitarist a lot faster.

Guitar Practice Routine – How To Practice Guitar