Many people choose to teach themselves the guitar, rather than taking the traditional route of having private lessons with a teacher. While having private lessons has many advantages, it is possible to become a highly skilled guitarist by taking the self-taught route. However, there is one big mistake that many people make when teaching themselves to play: read on to find out what it is and what you should do instead.
So, let’s not beat around the bush. The biggest mistake self-taught guitarists make is that they gather their initial information from a wide variety of sources and don’t follow a consistent lesson plan.
Too often it goes like this: the new aspiring guitarist picks up a few guitar magazines and tries to follow the tutorials, which usually only cover one or two very specific aspects of guitar playing. Or, as is common these days, you go online, search for “guitar lessons” or something similar, and start jumping from site to site and video to video, picking up a few chords here, a scale or two there. . , maybe the odd riff or solo, or even a few full songs.
And then a few months later, our new guitarist is feeling discouraged by his lack of progress and is considering giving up. Why? Because learning this way little by little means that they never developed a solid foundation on which to develop their skills, and without this foundation it is difficult, if not impossible, to go very far.
If you want to learn guitar on your own, you can avoid this mistake by choosing to follow a solid plan of quality guitar lessons. Just because you’re not learning with a teacher doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from following a consistent plan.
There are plenty of suitable options available for those going the self-taught route. You may want to purchase a traditional tutorial book, many of which now come with CDs, so you can listen to the exercises and music being played. Personally though, I think written instructions combined with video guitar lessons are a better option, because video guitar lessons allow you to see exactly what you should be doing with your hands. In this sense, it is the best thing to learn from a live teacher.
So if you want to learn guitar on your own, give yourself the best chance of success and start by following one of the many excellent video guitar courses that are available both on DVD and online.