The guitar is a cool instrument to learn, and more people than ever are trying to master it now. The big problem though is that people think it is going to be really easy to learn because of all the ads that promise to have them playing in 24 hours, or tutorials which make it seem really easy – when actually it is really hard.

First of all you need to get a good course to follow like the one discussed in this Jamorama review, or pay for lessons. Then you need to practice what you learn every day, as much as you can, to help build up the strength of your fingers and their dexterity, as well as allow you to move between chord shapes easily. Then you need to spend time to wrap your head around the theory side of music, how to read music, how to read tab, what time signatures are, what scales are etc.

I think the biggest problem people have when learning the guitar is practice. They assume that after an hour they will be sounding good and can then build on that skill, except you will probably be buzzing the strings for the first week as you learn, then every time you learn a new chord you will struggle with it, so practice doesn’t always sound great, but it is necessary. Even just changing between chords is going to require hours of dedicated practice so you can actually do it fast enough to play a recognizable song, and it may takes months to do it for enough chords to play a small repertoire of songs.

The moral of this article is that you can definitely learn to play the guitar, but just don’t rush in thinking you will playing Led Zeppelin in a week’s time.