does anyone know how to play guitar

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i really want to learn to guitar any tips for someone who is just starting out

Yeah. You will need to develop calluses on your fingertips in order to play the strings. They will hurt like crazy and possibly bleed at times, but eventually calluses will form. Until then, you can minimize the pain by applying a coating of superglue to your fingertips and letting it dry, every day before you practice.

1) Get a decent guitar. It can be very frustrating to play on an instrument that is poorly made or set up. If its easier to play you will play more. You dont need a Fender, Gibson or Martin, but stay away from the department store guitars. (If you are interested you can send me a PM and I will give you my .02 cents on whats out there)
2) Some of us are blessed with perfect or near perfect pitch. If you are not, buy a tuner.
3) I think its best to at least get help with the "mechanics" of the instrument. ( holding the pick, how to hold your hands, etc) If you don't have someone who can do this there are lots of video's out there. Find someone who plays the style of music you like.
4)Practice!! !! Make it fun. You will be amazed how fast you will be playing songs.
Good luck

Yes. The "nut" is the notched bar near the end of the neck where the strings get attached to the tuning pegs, and you definitely do not want one that has a large gap between the strings and the neck near the nut. The bigger the gap there, the more pressure and strain on your fingers as you play.


For me, that was back in the '60s and with friends in a garage with stuff like "Wild Thing" and "Hanky Panky", but learning from someone with a common interest and who *wants* to help you along can make a great difference. I had tried a few formal lessons, and I did not do well there.

Yea I didn't know that is there any thing so it won't hurt my fingers

I'm a guitarist, 25 years experince playing and a BA in guitar. If your finger bleed, you're doing something wrong. Callouses will form slowly over time, but you should start with a guitar that has action low enough and string tension light enough that it doesn't rip up your fingers and hands. Injuring yourself is not an effective way to learn any musical instrument.

Beginners are often advised to start with a nylon string guitar, and for kids or people with small hands there's also 3/4 sized guitars available from a few makers. I'd recommend strating on acoustic so you can just focus on learning guitar (less equipment, less fuss). But you should start with an instrument that feels confortable to you. You'll feel some soreness as the muscles in your hands and lower arms develop, but limit yourself to playing for short periods a day, each day, rather than playing a lot on one day. For beginner, it is much more effective for developing your hand and arm muscles if you play 30-40 minutes, 6 days a week with one day off. That way you develop your muscles gradually and without injury. You should never, never overextend yourself to the point you injure your fingers, hands or lower arms, This is about playing music, not some primative, macho rite of passage.

Agreed. I once cut myself at work and had to tape the ends of two fingers so they would not bleed *while* I was playing, but there is no need for a guitar to cause you any harm.

Good advice here.

Yeah ok, this is good advice.

However, comma, if you are like I was and want to learn to play *right now* using a steel-string electric guitar, and their good advice doesn't stop you from doing so, then you can try my trick, ok?

I love the advice guys really
I have a acoustic guitar I got from Samash
idk how to tune it with out a tuner
I have no what tabs are idk know well
umm lets see half the time I would get frustrated cause I can't play single note right
I had a teacher but he wasn't good teacher like I would have once every two weeks
I don't get how to read music I have a book of how to read it what finger goes where
but it's hard

It's never too early to start writing songs. If you can play a pattern continuously, you can write a song. Experimentation and improvisation will teach you a lot. If you're making sound, you're learning.

Youtube is the music student's best friend (besides their instrument, of course).
There are plenty of videos out there that will show you everything, how to tune and re-string a guitar, the chord progressions to popular songs, and heaps more.
Also, it may seem unnecessary to you now, but in my opinion it is really worth learning how to read music, by that I mean dots on a stave, as well as TAB. For this, I recommend finding a good tutor book, especially if you don't have a teacher of any kind. (Music is an expensive hobby, but it's worth every cent). You may be different, but I always found the proper musical notation easier to read that the TAB, but that was probably because I had learnt other instruments before the guitar. Try just reading one note at a time at first, then gradually add more notes. It's important not to go too far ahead. Make sure you a very familiar with each concept before you move on. It doesn't matter how long it takes, but in my opinion you'll end up a better guitarist at the end of it. But after all, music is all about having fun, right? I like to just muck around on the fretboard and making new discoveries of nice sounds as I go. It's how I learned the fretboard, and the positionings of all the notes. Make sure you're enjoying yourself in the meantime, because I cannot imagine how boring it would be to just learn off the books.

I hope this helps, and by the way, I have never had any problems with my fingers as a result of playing the guitar.

Along with showing the fingerings for chords, your book likely also shows where to find individual notes, and I would suggest you begin there and become comfortable with simple tunes. For example:

"Middle C" (the "Doe" of "Do, Re, Mi") is at the third fret on the 5th string (with your ring finger), then "D" (Re) is an open (no finger) 4th string, then "E" (Mi) is at the second fret on that same (4th) string (middle finger) ... and then plucking those in that order uses only two fingers without having to move your hand and you get "Do, Re, Mi" ... and there you have the beginning notes of "Row (C), row (C), row (C) your (D) boat (E)".

Then next, "gen-tly down" gets played with another "E", and then lifting your middle finger to play a "D" and then putting your middle finger back 'down' (almost a pun) for another "E" completes that part ("gen(E)-tly(D) down(E)". Then, the "F" for "the" in "the stream" gets played by dropping your ring finger right next to your middle finger and on the *third* fret of the fourth string, and then the "G" for "stream" gets plucked on an open third string with all fingers removed and out of the way.

I hope that makes some sense, and my overall point is this:

You can learn to play the entire "Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do" scale by using just three fingers (and only one at a time, of course) within the first three frets and on only four strings (five through two), thereby gaining a little familiarity and agility for soon just dropping all three fingers at once in those same positions in order to be able to strum a complete "C" chord.

I've been playing a year, classical guitar, and have got up to level 4. My advice is get a good teacher, and practise obsessively. If you apply aspie single mindedness to it, then you can really progress in leaps and bounds.

Youtube really is your friend as well.

thanks guys
any tips on tuning cause everytime i tune it i have to use a tuner machine

There's nothing to be ashamed of in using an electronic tuner. Developing the ear for this kind of thing takes time and experience. If you really want to learn to use you ear though, you can try things like tuning the E string, then tuning the rest of the guitar to itself, or using a tuning fork or a piano to tune to.

I was learing classical guitar formally for a while, but I didn't get that far, all my practice and attentions was shifted towards the saxophone and the clarinet. My aspie friend plays classical guitar, he did an exam just recently. He can do all those scary jazz chords too. He's always showing off that he's a better guitarist than me and my reply is "you go and learn 4 instruments and get as good as I am at all of them, then, maybe, you could claim to be better than me."

Yes it's true, if you have the right aspie dedication, you can progress at this pretty damn fast. When I first learnt the saxophone, I was booked in for the grade 2 exam after a week of playing . I've now been playing for about 2 years, and will be doing grade 7 next year (these 'grades' are Australian standards, I don't know how they compare to the rest of the world).

Assuming the 6th string is at least close to its own "E":
The 5th fret on the 6th string then plays the "A" for string 5;
The 5th fret on the 5th string then plays the "D" for string 4;
The 5th fret on the 4th string then plays the "G" for string 3;
The 4th fret on the 3rd string then plays the "B" for string 2;
The 5th fret on the 2nd string then plays the "E" for string 1.

Or, I believe it is the 7th fret on string 5 that is an octave above string 6 open,
then the 7th fret on 4 is an octave above 5 open and so on until you get to string 2.

However, there is an "accumulated error" that will likely show itself as a result of that kind of progression from one string to the next, so ...

What I do is to play the 1st and 6th strings open and together (using a pick) along with the 4th string at the 2nd fret,
and that lets you play 3 octaves of "E" and get them all sounding right together ...
and then I play the "G" found at the 3rd fret on the 1st string for tuning the 3rd string open,
and then the 2nd fret on that freshly-tuned 3rd string can provide an octave "A" for string 5,
and then the 2nd fret on 5 can provide an octave "B" for string 2 ...
and then the 3rd fret on string 2 can be used to check against the "D" of string 4 open ...
and all of that works especially well when tuning a 12-string guitar that can be hyper-sensitive to using the 5th fret for tuning.