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Start Learning Guitar Today – Beginners Start Here

This lesson is the first guitar lesson you should watch. You will learn to play some basic chords and notes, and how to pick or strum.

We will learn some basic guitar strumming patterns, talk about switching guitar chords, play some single notes, and just go over the absolute basics of playing guitar.

Here are the chord charts for the basic chords from the video:

When you practice switching chords on guitar, just take your time. It will get easy over time, and you will get faster at guitar by practicing slow.

Here are the alternate A major chords I discuss in this guitar lesson:

  • Mel Bay A chord
  • Bar A chord
  • Cheater A chord
  • Birdsnake A chord

I suggest learning the first shape, which I call the Mel Bay A chord because it was in the standard Mel Bay guitar books (https://amzn.to/2W8bCoz). This way your hands and brain can get used to your fingers fitting into the space of the guitar. Over time you should transition to the bar version or the 234 version which I labeled “Birdsnake A chord” above.

The cheater version of the A chord is just that, a cheat. As you develop as a guitar player there is not time or place where your fingers will be in that order across one fret, so it’s a bad habit to start.

Just for fun, here’s the 0-3-5 tab

Other Beginner Guitar Lessons:

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Learning The Notes of the Guitar Neck

In this lesson on the guitar fretboard we talk about how to find any note on the neck of the guitar. We will go over exactly how to find any note, and I’ll share some strategies for how to start memorizing the notes on the fretboard.

The most important things to take away from this video is the names of the open strings on guitar – EADGBE, the musical alphabet – ABCDEFG, and the spaces between the notes.

One easy way to remember the string names is with a mnemonic. “Even Average Dogs Get Bones Eventually” is one, but we go over a few in the video.

The first thing to know is that there are sharp notes or flat notes between some of the notes, and other notes have no space.

There is no space between E and F, and there is no space between B and C. All of the other notes will have one note between them, and it will be a sharp or flat note.

Sharps and flats represent the exact same tone, but the name can change depending on what key you are in. As a beginner, it’s easiest to remember that one fret lower on the guitar is flat, and one fret higher on the guitar is sharp.

One way to begin to learn the fretboard is to memorize small groupings of notes

BCD – EFG
EFG

Another way to learn the notes on the guitar is to recognize the visual pattern of the location of a note.