Many guitar enthusiasts manage to learn guitar through several informal means, such as through friends, guitar books, online guitar training websites, etc. However, one must be very careful while going for any such means of guitar learning because most of them are nothing but absolute claptraps and comprise of stuff downloaded from different guitar related websites and forums. If you do not bear these aspects in mind and go ahead with using such informal means of guitar training, then you are sure to develop incorrect guitar playing techniques, which can be very dangerous for your guitar training, because you may take very long to identify your mistakes and rectify them. This may also cause a lot of frustration to the learner.
Therefore, guitar experts like Steve Krenz explain through their guitar training programs, that the real secret to successful guitar learning lies more in avoiding making crucial mistakes. You should be happy with learning the correct techniques and progressing slowly, rather than learning incorrect techniques and progressing fast. Here are some useful tips for absolute newbies and beginners, from the Learn and Master Guitar Program, to ensure that they avoid making crucial mistakes while learning to play guitar –
1. Familiarize yourself with the different parts of a guitar and the role of each different part,
2. Always sit or stand in the correct posture while playing to avoid strain to the neck, hands or the shoulders,
3. Learn the correct right and left hand positioning and finger movements, right from the beginning, as it always helps in quickest chord transitions and greater perfection in playing each single note.
4. Learn how to read music notations and guitar tablatures, as it will be very useful throughout your musical career to learn new songs and guitar licks,
5. You must put in effort to understand chord formulas and practice regularly so that you can memorize all chords and improve the timings of your chord transition rate.
6. In order to eliminate the problem of finger soreness, you must exercise your fingers for improving their agility and strength,
7. Learn how to tune your guitar.
8. Never skip the basics of guitar playing
9. Never ignore practicing regularly using the correct technique,
10. Learn everything about the chords like - introduction to basic chords (major and minor), chord progressions, chord transition, chord substitution for major and minor chords, etc very seriously. Never rush through this portion because chords are the basic elements of guitar playing. If you do not get them correctly, then you will have a very faulty foundation of guitar knowledge and you can hardly build anything upon such shaky knowledge.
11. Learning about strumming patterns, strumming techniques and strumming exercises is very important, especially if you are interested in developing rhythm guitar playing skills.
12. Regularly practice exercises for developing your play-by-ear skills and for improved ear training techniques and exercises, which will help you recognize chords, when you simply hear any song or a fast guitar lick play,
13. Develop an understanding of scales (major, minor and pentasonic scales) so that you can recognize them well, as this is very important for lead guitar skills.
Never rush through any of these aspects of guitar learning as they provide a very strong foundation to your guitar learning skills. With the Steve Krenz Learn and Master Guitar program, which covers a wide array of topics starting right from the basics to the advanced level guitar playing skills, everything is taught in the most effective and interesting manner, using a multi-sensorial teaching approach (using audio-visual as well as textual formats for teaching). The best thing about this program is that the DVDs allow you to learn these concepts at your own pace – there is no forced learning involved.