Every great guitar player was once a beginner. And if they survived the early stages, then you probably can too.

These 4 guitar tips for beginners are designed to ease your transition into intermediate playing and beyond. If you follow them closely, you’ll feel the difference in the practice room before long.

In my view, one of the best things you can do as a beginner guitarist is to become a student of the instrument and of music in general. Too many guitar players fall into the trap of thinking they can “get away” with knowing as little as possible about what they’re doing.

Of course, you can play guitar well without a lot of formal study. In fact, many guitarists claim to know little to no music theory or have virtually no formal training. I have nothing but respect for these types of players.

That said, I think it’s worth saying that knowing more about the guitar and about music will only help. Your overall knowledge of music theory, for instance, will be a huge advantage in the practice room.
 

A Tale of Two Beginners

 

Let’s do a quick mental experiment to demonstrate this point: suppose we have two beginner guitarists, but one is a layperson who’s new to music study while the other is a concert pianist.

The layperson comes to the guitar both as a technical beginner (no guitar chops) and a musical beginner (little to no knowledge of chords, harmony, notes, rhythms, and so forth).

However the concert pianist comes to the guitar only as a technical beginner. While they still need to practice barring, shifting, fretting, and picking, they know what chords are, why we play them, which ones work together, and so much more. With these tools at their disposal, they’re going to learn guitar much faster than a layperson.

All of which is to say, don’t be afraid to get yourself some musical training. Any advances in your musicianship will be immediately reflected in your guitar playing. So be sure to open yourself up to new knowledge, whether you’re studying on your own or taking lessons.

If you’re a beginner guitar player, you should focus on accuracy over speed. All too often we make the mistake of feeling we need to play fast in order to improve fast. In fact, the exact opposite is true: fast playing will usually slow down your progress. You should definitely let this one sink in, as it’s one of the best guitar tips for beginners.

Accurate playing is difficult for a number of reasons. For one, it forces you to go slower than you want to.

To see the truth in this, think of what you do whenever you need to be really careful in your normal life: you slow down. The surest way to avoid cutting your finger along with the carrots is to slow down your chopping speed. The surest way to avoid a car accident when the roads get dicey is to lean on the brakes. We just need to apply this logic to the guitar.

Another challenge of accurate playing is that it forces you to be more mindful of your sound. When you’re taking pains to play accurately, you’re more likely to pick up on musical nuances.

For instance, slowing down your tempo a bit, you might realize that your bassline is kind of muddled, with open strings ringing over each other. It’s really easy to miss the little things, but each little thing you fix really adds up to a polished performance.

I don’t claim that any of this is easy. Yet we all know that what’s easy rarely gets results. There is some good news, however: playing slowly and accurately is much more peaceful and enjoyable than playing fast with mistakes.

I urge you to alternate between playing for accuracy and playing for speed. Compare the experiences and I think you’ll agree that even though accurate playing takes discipline, it’s surprisingly fun and rewarding. You’ll also notice that sloppy, thoughtless playing can be sort of depressing. I’d say the choice is clear!

Ear training is an important yet often overlooked part of learning guitar. Always remember that music is like a language. The goal of ear training is to help you recognize important sounds in that language.

But the idea of training your ears might seem intimidating. Maybe you can sort of hear the difference between a major and a minor chord, but does that mean you’ll actually be able to recognize individual notes or intervals? Can someone like you ever learn to play by ear?

The answer is . . . yes! Obviously I don’t know you personally, but no matter how bad you think your “natural ear” is, you can improve it with practice. You just need to get started. In my experience, the hardest aspect of ear training is to accept the idea that you can actually train your ear.

That may sound a little silly. Yet we all know how easily we can get “psyched out,” putting off something we care about just because of some kind of mental block. I encourage you to attack ear training as early as possible in your guitar learning process.

 

How to Get Started with Ear Training

 

I’d say the best way is to train your ear by degrees. You might begin by attempting to tune your guitar by ear, then correcting your mistakes with a tuner. This will force you to pay more attention to the pitch of each string, and before long you’ll have a lot more confidence judging sound in general.

Another good approach is to use a free or paid ear training service online. As you might guess, there are many of them. Feel free to do some research for yourself as to what might work best for your musical style. Personally, I really like Earmaster. It covers all the bases I need and I’ve never had issues with it.

However, you don’t need any fancy software or course to train your ear. You can do a lot of work just by listening closely to the sounds you’re making and coming up with your own ear training drills.
 

Tommy Emmanuel’s Ear Training Exercise

 

You could do worse than to take a page from the great Tommy Emmanuel’s book. Supposedly he trained his ears by doing the following game with his brother: with one guitar between them, they would switch off having one of them play a note or chord and the other one (with his back to the guitar) guess what was played.

If you’re not so lucky as to have a musical sibling, friend, or partner, you can do this exercise alone by recording yourself playing sequences of notes, chords, intervals, and so forth, and then playing back the recording at a later time.

You won’t normally see this among guitar tips for beginners. Yet I like to make the point that guitar playing is more of a mental discipline than a physical one. Thus, it only makes sense for us to develop our mental chops.

In a sense, you do this every time you sit down for a normal physical practice. Given that your mind ultimately controls your body, everything you do on the guitar is largely mental. Yet I think we can go a step further. Indeed, there’s really no reason we can’t have effective practice sessions that are entirely mental.

So let’s put the guitar aside for a minute and consider the world of mental practice. I have made a point to explore this world, and from my 2 years of experience in the field I can definitively say that every type of physical practice has a mental equivalent.

For a fuller treatment of this topic, you should check out this post I wrote on mental practice. But for now I’ll give you a brief rundown of different forms to mental work to get you started.
 

1. Listening to music while following along with a score. This will help you connect the sounds you’re hearing to the notes, tabs, or chords on the page. If you do this enough, you’ll gain the ability to “hear” sheet music just by looking at it.
2. Reading through pieces you already know away from the guitar. This will help you learn more about the structure of the music you’re learning. I’ve noticed that it’s hard to read a score very closely when you have your instrument in hand.
3. Reading through new music, with or without a recording. I consider this practice “mental sight reading,” and it’s basically like reading through new music like you would a new book. It won’t be easy at first, but if you do this enough you’ll become a great reader of music, allowing you to learn songs much more quickly than in the past.
4. Visualization: purely mental work where you simply imagine yourself playing through music you know well. This can help you isolate memory problems you might have, plus it works in many of the same ways as physical practice.

 

Each of these 4 types of mental practice has many varieties depending on your circumstances. Generally speaking, you want to start with the easiest form of mental practice (listening to music with a score in hand) and expand out from there.

 

The Most Important Type of Mental Practice

  

 

The most important (and challenging) type of mental practice involves a conscious shaping of the mind. You need your mentalities to align with your guitar goals rather than stand in opposition to them.

For instance, if you’re always telling yourself that you’ll never be a good guitarist, no amount of practice is going to make you feel good enough. You’re also likely to stall your own progress unnecessarily. The key is to replace that negative narrative, “I’ll never be any good,” with a positive and helpful narrative like, “I have a real knack for this.”

Consider the idea that guitar progress is less about building a playing mechanism and more about removing mental obstacles. You might be surprised at how quickly you can build guitar chops if your mind isn’t working against you. Believe me when I say that barre chords aren’t the hard part; shifting isn’t the hard part; and neither are chord changes.

Rather, the hard part is learning to believe in yourself as a musician. You become a great player mentally before you become one physically. If you adopt the right guitar-learning philosophy, you’ll basically find all the difficulties you used to have to be mere illusions. You’ll overcome them easily! But again, the real challenge is to direct the power of your mind toward your goal rather than against it.

For more of a discussion around this topic, you should head to The #1 Secret to Guitar Progress!

I hope at least some of these guitar tips for beginners resonate with you. Starting out is never easy, but if you take the right approach you don’t need to be a beginner for long.

If you liked this post, be sure to check out my other posts geared toward beginner guitarists. You might head to The Best Practice Routine for Beginners, and you’ll also like these 7 Tips for Beginner Guitarists.

Good luck with your practicing!

Are you looking to upgrade your gear or browse some awesome guitar learning materials? Check out my recommendations page to see all my favorite stuff. 

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