If you have recently bought a guitar, the next step is to find some tabs for songs to learn and some diagrams to help you learn to play chords. But with thousands of tabs out there, where do you start? With just some easy songs for beginners like maybe Happy Birthday or Scarborough Fair? You could go that route but it would be a little more interesting if you could learn material that was more to your liking.
If you like country songs, you can start with an internet search for "free country guitar tabs" and you will get a bunch of links to a wide range of country guitar tabs which will take some time to sort through to find songs you like. Or you could get more immediately usable results if you type the name of a guitarist or singer into a search engine accompanied by "free tabs". You straight away get tabs of songs by your favorite artist that you can start learning to play right away.
The tabs you have found might have letters at the top showing you which chords to use to accompany the song or melody. To begin learning chords, limit your selection of songs to ones that contain easy chords like C, E, G, G7, A, Em, Am or F. In general do not go for songs that require you to learn chords that have "7", "sus", "aug" or "dim" after them. Apart from G7 they are not necessary to learn at the moment. Now you need to do a search for chord diagrams which are easy to understand pictures of fingerings of chords on the guitar neck.
Armed with your chord diagrams, you can get to the business of learning how to play the guitar chords for the songs you have chosen. This is where the phrase "Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?" is often heard. The very act of putting your fingers down in a chord shape and then taking them off again and making another chord shape can fill the beginner guitarist's head with images of hours of boring work for little reward. The fact is, for a while learning chords will be like that. But this stage will be quite short if you keep at it. The more practice you do, the faster your muscle memory comes into play and the quicker the feeling of boredom is replaced by one of achievement.
The difficulty for a learner guitar player in playing chords is centered in the left hand, the one that makes the chord shapes. Giving the right hand something to do is important because too much concentration on the unfamiliar work of fingering chords will make your guitar practice sessions too stressful. So make sure you have your plectrum ready and do some strumming each time you finger a chord. So if you are learning a song that contains the chords C, A minor, F and G7, start by making sure your hand is nice and relaxed, take the C fingering without too much tension in the hand or arm, and watch out for any tendency you might have to hold your breath. Now strum across all the strings with the plectrum using four down strokes. Count 1 2 3 4. Now relax away from the chord shape and the counting and take the Am chord fingering. Relax again. And count again.
Practice all the chords as I have described, in any order, remembering that the way you begin each fingering is the most important thing. Relaxation is key. There is plenty of time to rush when you are dead. After a few days and a few moments of despondency you will start to notice that your fingers are taking the chord shape BEFORE YOU THINK ABOUT IT. This is the moment you have been practicing for. Now you have some proof that relaxation and trust in muscle memory works, your progress as a guitar player will become a little bit easier.
Ricky Sharples has many more tips for guitar players of all levels at his blog Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free, a continuously updated directory of free guitar lessons, videos, chord charts and lots of useful guitar stuff.
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