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Start with the basics!

It doesn’t matter whether you play an acoustic guitar, an electric, a classical or even an electric acoustic, your first country guitar lesson should be the same as everyone else’s, even if they are all learning to play rhythm and blues and wouldn’t be caught dead in hand tooled boots and a checked shirt.

No matter what kind of music you think you want to play at this stage, the basics are exactly the same and consist of learning where the notes are in the first position on the guitar, what the major chords are and how to fret them, and how to strum and pick the strings in time. On the whole, the various lessons available for these skills don’t vary all that much, but the skills and personalities of the tutors most certainly do. So, too, does the quality of the teaching material, and that makes up a great deal of what you are paying for.

Now, you will come across advertisements that suggest you can be a guitar player inside a week or even less. That is simply a way of getting you to part with money. What you can do is learn a simple song in a day, which should encourage you to develop your playing further. But learning one song, or even six, doesn’t mean you can play the guitar. It just means that you can amuse yourself and your friends for a limited amount of time until you all get bored and do something else.

So, starting with my next country guitar lesson, I’m going to introduce you to some online lessons that will allow you to play songs remarkably quickly, but at the same time will not leave out the essentials of learning the guitar. Believe me when I say that as an absolute minimum you do need to at least learn to read tab and you do need to know what chords you are holding down and why. But if you really want to fulfil your potential and that of your instrument, you will take it much further than that, and so in my next Country Guitar Lesson we’ll take a look inside the most complete guitar training system of them all.