10 Ways To Play Guitar Sooner

What's this awkward title? I'm not talking about playing faster, or better, I'm talking about going from someone who doesn't play guitar to someone who does. That's it. If you want to get crazy with buying gear and learning musical theory later, that's great. Most new players just want to start making musical noise as soon as possible, so let's do that.

1. Listen to a ton of guitar based music all the time.
If you don't listen to a lot of guitar based music, you will never get good at guitar. It's simple. People listen to what they like, if you listen to guitar that means you like it, if you listen to it a lot that means you love it, and if you love it that is the best motivation to get good enough at it. Also you need a lot of songs in your brain for later when you decide which songs to play. You don't need to be well-rounded.

2. Decide who to copy.
Google the player(s) you like the most from step 1, learn their names, listen to everything they recorded on Spotify, watch YouTube clips of them playing live. Make a conscious effort to copy them and be derivative. Originality is great, but it takes time and years of experimentation and we're trying to get you playing right now. Important: if your favorite player uses a pick, you have to use one too or else you can't copy them. If your favorite player doesn't use a pick, you have to learn to play without a pick. I don't recommend choosing virtuosos such as Joe Satriani or Eddie van Halen.

3. Buy cheap gear.
A common phrase in music instruction: "buy the best gear you can afford". This doesn't work for beginners because they don't know enough to judge the quality of gear. I suggest buying a cheap piece of crap, because you might hate playing and give up, so it's better to not waste money. I recommend pawn shops and eBay. Get something with obvious cosmetic damage, these sell for cheap even if the functional parts of the instrument are high quality. I have personally done this and recommend it to everyone. You don't even need an amp, but the distorted sound of your guitar through an amp might be a good motivator.

4. Get Smartchord.
It's a great app that becomes more valuable the better you get. For now you only need the tuner feature, which tells you how out of tune your guitar strings are when you play them into your phone's mic, and it tells you which direction to twist your guitar's knobs to make the strings be in tune. It's my favorite tuning app, and has a million bonus features that will come in very handy later on. Tune your guitar, or else it will sound bad no matter how well you play.

5. Pick a few simple songs and get tabs, not sheet music.
"Tabs" are ultra simple sheet music for learning songs, and you don't need to know music theory to read them. Say you want to learn "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Google "Smells Like Teen Spirit Tab" and pick whatever tab is the most popular. If you want to figure the song out by ear, I salute that, but it is a much slower process unless you have great critical listening ability (most people don't). You will never have to learn how to read sheet music in order to play rock n' roll.

6. Play along to recordings instead of a metronome.
Everyone says to play along to a metronome and that's wrong. Two excellent reasons for this: recordings make you learn and play every part of the song from beginning to end, in order. Second, recordings make you develop realistic rhythm. Recordings are better than a metronome because you develop solid rhythm but with the variations and imperfections that great players have. If you get behind or forget where you are, the recording marches on without you. This helps you build musical reflexes and the habit of recovering quickly from mistakes.

7. (Optional) Learn every note on the two fattest strings.
Use one of the features on Smartchord that shows a diagram of the guitar neck, with little letters all over it to tell you which notes are which. Learn the notes on the fattest string, then if you want you can add the notes of its neighbor string. There is a predictable pattern to the note names, if you spend enough time messing with the diagram and playing each note on the fattest string, you'll figure it out.

8. (Optional) Learn these chords on the fattest string: F# major, F# minor, F#5 and  F#7.
Smartchord has diagrams to show you how to play these. Once you learn these shapes, you can move them all over the guitar. If you did step 7, you know where the notes are on the guitar. If you learn F# major, all you have to do is move it up to the note C, and now you're playing C major. If you learn F# minor, just move it up to the note C, now it's C minor. And so on. When you have a grip on that, learn them on the second-fattest string as well. Now you know 99.7% of all chords you'll ever need.

9. (Very optional) Learn the Ab Major scale, Ab minor scale, and Ab blues scale.
Again, Smartchord has diagrams for this. Just like before, you can use the knowledge from step 7 to move the scale to any note and it will be a different scale. Once you've learned Ab major, move it up to the note D and play the same scale and guess what? Now it's D major.

This isn't necessarily the best way for everyone in the world to learn to play, but it has worked well for me and everyone I've taught. It also minimizes the amount of dead time that you will endure before being able to start playing songs. And the amount of money you have to blow on equipment and books.

I cut out tip #10 so you can start playing even sooner.