Learn to Play Guitar – Foundation Skills

Hi. In this section I want to list the important things about how to learn guitar. This is an introduction for the lessons that follow.

Learn to play guitar foundational skills…

Building a good foundation of basic playing skills and musical 'knowledge' will help you avoid bad habits, mistakes and frustration. Having a solid foundation to build on is important if you want to learn guitar efficiently and as quickly as possible.

Having a plan with defined goals and targets is what it's all about. These are 'simple' concepts and you will do well to implement them into your daily practice routine. Always keep them in your mind and use them as a quality check for your playing. Make them a habit.

10 practice tips that will slash your learning time in half!

1. Basic practice method – how to use muscle-memory practice techniques to develop a relaxed, fluent, easy and effortless playing style free of mistakes and fumbling
2. Straight-lines playing – how to eliminate excessive finger movements when changing chords and playing scales/solos
3. Basic picking and strumming technique – how to develop the most effective and accurate picking and strumming habits for maximum technique development – avoid bad habits that cause restrictions in your technique
4. Simple guitar music theory – understand how scales and chords are made and how they are used with 99% of the music you listen to and want to learn
5. Understand how chord 'families' work – chords work together in groups of 2 or 4, generally. We call the groups of chords 'chord progressions' - how chords progress from one to another
6. Chord progressions – 99% of all music is based on simple chord progressions. There are several 'common' chord progressions that are used in thousands of songs. Learning to recognize the chord progressions when you hear them is one of the most important skills you can develop as a musician. And practicing these chord progressions in all keys is important, too.
7. Keep it simple – learning to play simple things the best you can with a great sound sets you up to play more complicated things that sound even better. Always strive to produce a high-quality 'emotion-packed' sound in all your playing. Learn to exercise control over your picking, strumming, muting, light and shade etc. It's always infinitely more pleasurable listening to someone play something simple with a beautiful sound and good control than to hear someone playing something rip-shit-and-bust with a horrible sound.
8. Always try to sing what you play - this is a magic technique that will really turbo-boost the speed at which you can learn songs by ear.
9. Develop multiple skills at the same time - incorporating these ideas together when practicing means you are really practicing/reinforcing  many different things at the same time. This dramatically slashes your skill development time.
10. Make sure you practice at least 6 days per week, even if just for 15-30 minutes. This ensures steady forward momentum and rapid compounding of skill development. If you only practice spasmodically, your muscle-memory development will suffer, and you will always be going back to redo things you have forgotten since you last practiced. Better to do 15-30 minutes every day than to do two or three  3 hour sessions a week. Common sense, really. (If you really are serious and want to get good fast, then you will make the time to practice every day.)

So these are the topics that will be covered in this section. Plus a lot more.