How to Play Guitar: In Videos

Learning how to play guitar can be an experience of uncertainty. Guitar lesson videos can be helpful. Unfortunately, knowing where to start in your pursuit of learning guitar is the toughest part. Even though Youtube videos are extremely helpful, guessing which videos to watch when you are starting can be overwhelming.  It can take an hour just to find the right video for the next step in learning guitar.

Use this page as your guitar lesson reference for beginning to play guitar. Each video has been chosen by someone who has been playing for over 12 years... me. I don't have a lot of time to teach people guitar, because I would rather write and record songs than teach guitar lessons. So, I am putting this page together for anyone interested in beginner guitar lessons. It's the most efficient way to help as many people as possible.

You can bookmark this page and come back to it as you progress through your video lessons. Feel free to investigate all the YouTube guitar lessons on your own, but expect to be overwhelmed if you are a beginner.

The following videos are very useful for the beginner guitar player who has not ever really played guitar.  You must know some basic information such as parts of the guitar and how to tune a guitar before proceeding on to more guitar lessons.

The parts of the guitar work together to give you the magical sound that guitar players are able to get.  If you know all the parts and understand how the sound is made, you will have a better chance at controlling the instrument to do what you want it to do.  As you learn from more videos, you will understand what the instructor is talking about when he mentions the parts of the guitar.

Tuning a guitar is one of the mundane processes that becomes second nature for an experienced guitar player.  You will eventually train your ear with experience to be able to hear when a guitar is out of tune or has poor intonation only hearing a simple chord strummed.  Tuning and guitar set up is more important than most beginners realize.  Get yourself in tune so you can play along with the instructional guitar videos.

Strumming chords may seem easy when you watch a professional or an enthusiast, but it takes some coordination.  Those of us who aren't extremely coordinated have to practice strumming until we can feel the rhythm and it becomes natural.  Getting the up and down movement is the basis for all the more complicated strumming patterns, so it's a good place to start.

Once you get the concept of strumming out of the way, it's time for you to learn some basic guitar chords. Chords are useful when you want to play songs and sing.

Try to learn one chord at a time at first, then try to practice moving back and forth between those chords. Watch your left hand to make sure you have enough curve in your fingers so you don't accidentally mute strings you don't mean to mute.

The following video goes through many basic guitar chords. It would be ambitious of you to try to play through all of them right away. Practice one or two at a time at first. Get those down and then move onto more.  Watch these videos over and over again until you get it.  It takes some time, so don't give up if you don't get it right away.

One of the best genres of music to learn first for a guitar player is blues. The blues are an expressive genre that forms a common language between many musicians. In other words, if you learn to play blues, you can improvise and play instantly with other people who also know how to play blues.

The great thing is that blues can be as simple or complicated as you want to make it. You can play fast or slow, and it sounds great either way. Learn a basic blues shuffle in E to be an instant background track for anyone you play with who also plays blues.

The blues shuffle is an essential for anyone claiming to be a guitar player, and other musicians will appreciate you for having this under your belt. The blues shuffle is the father of the rock n' roll shuffle that you hear from guys like Chuck Berry, Johnny Winter, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Watch the following guitar lesson video to learn the blues shuffle in E.  The first song I ever wrote was a blues shuffle, and you can watch me play it 9 years after writing it.

Once you have the blues shuffle down, the next natural step for you is to learn the pentatonic scale. The pentatonic scale is a useful way to start to play solos and lead guitar when you want to be able to make up your own stuff. Even if you don't want to, it is important to know, because it is so common in most people's solos, it will make figuring their solos out easier to do.

The pentatonic scale is a scale that takes five notes to go through an octave. You don't have to know what that means to play it, which is the beautiful thing about learning it. It will transfer all up and down the neck of the guitar, so if you learn the pentatonic scale in one key, you will be able to play it in any key. Watch these following videos to see how it's done.

The minor scale is useful in minor blues, jazz, and many other styles of music.  The minor scale can add flavor to solos even when you don't spend all your time in it.  Think about Santana's sweet solos which include minor scale stuff, pentatonic stuff, and blues scale stuff.  You'll have the scale you need to be in a jam band if you know this minor scale.

The major scale is the happy sounding scale that is also found in many types of music including rock, country, pop, funk, etc.  You should learn the major scale so you aren't missing out when you need to improvise over music that the pentatonic scale won't work for.  The major scale will help when you are playing with songs that contain mostly or all major chords.

These guitar lesson videos were chosen by me because I have learned guitar and I know that these are basic skills that you will need to play guitar.  Use it like a guitar teacher, and realize you are going to have to practice playing.  You won't get better by watching videos, you have to play.

As I have time, I will add more videos to this page. You can bookmark this page and use it as a reference for what to learn next on guitar.  If you have questions, be sure to write them in the comments section so I can add more videos to answer you.  Good luck learning to play guitar with these videos.