How To Play Guitar For Beginners (2025)

1. Course Introduction: Hi, I'm Jay Ellis, and welcome to my Skillshare course on how to play guitar for beginners. I'm a professional guitar player, and in that time, I've toured across the globe, played with named artists, and working with some of the country's best studios. Now, whether you've just picked up the guitar for the first time or you're looking to build a solid foundation, you're in the right place. Now in this course, I'm gonna walk you through the essential techniques needed to get you started on your guitar journey. Cover posture and hand position and give you some basic exercises to help build strength and dexterity in your fingers. We're also going to dive into some of the most common chords used on guitar. So by the end of the course, you'll have the confidence to play along to your favorite songs at home. I'll break everything down into a nice and easy to follow step by step guide so I can guide you along your journey. Don't worry if you get stuck. You can always go back and rewatch some of the videos until you master these exercises. Now, this course is for beginners, so no previous experience required. I'm going to make this as easy as possible to my step by step guide where I break everything down into bite sized chunks. I've also included diagrams and support and resources to really guide you through this journey. I'm really excited to start this journey with you. So grab your guitar, get comfortable, and let's dive into the first lesson. 2. Tuning The Guitar: Okay, so let's get started. We're going to begin with the parts of the guitar. So this here is obviously your body. It's the main bulk of the guitar. And then right here, we've got the neck. On the other side of the neck here, we've got the fretboard, and these individual metal pieces here are your frets. Now, when playing the guitar, you want to make sure your fingers stay in between those frets, not on the metal lines themselves, nice and in between. Up here, we've got the tuning pegs. This is what we used to tune the guitar. And then down here, we've got the bridge. Under these strings here on my electric guitar, I've got pickups, and I've got a selection of pickups. I've got the humbucker and I've got single coils. We'll get into those a little bit later. Three knobs on the guitar, volume, which obviously operates the volume of the pickups and in the tone, which operates the tone of the individual pickups. And in here, I've got a little switch, which just turns on and off each individual pickup. Now, tuning of the guitar, six strings, and we've got a nice easy little rhyme to remember the name of those strings. So we have got E, A, D. G, B and E. And the rhyme is every Alsatian dog grows big. Ears, E, A, D, G, B, E. If you guitar slightly at tune, grab a tuner, and you can use these tuning pegs here to tighten and loosen the strings until you reach those pitches. 3. Posture and Basic Picking Practice: Now. Posture and holding the guitar. Sit it comfortably on your lap, and you want a nice straight back. Don't slouch. It's gonna cause yourself problems, lay it down the line. Fretting hand placement, you want to think about keeping your hand there like a crab claw. We're going to push on the back of the neck with our thumb, not this section of our hand here. Real quickly, if you grab your picking hand, and you squeeze your hand, just like so, use this part of your thumb. Squeeze. You can't grip very tight. Change that grip now, introduce that thumb. You can press a lot harder. And that's going to help us down the line. We're getting better note placement. So I'm going to grip my guitar like so. On the back of the guitar, my thumb sits in the middle of the neck. It gives me a nice rounded support. My wrist underneath the neck, it allows me to stretch as well. For my thumbs up here, I'm limiting my stretch, the reach of my fingers. It's going to cause us problems. And again, we're gonna be pushing from there, which is going to cause us a few pains in the wrist. So a nice nice grip on the guitar like so. Wrist underneath. Terms of the pick, you want as minimal of the pick showing as possible and this can feel a little weird at first. You'll get used to it, and you'll find your own way of using the pick and you'll find what's most comfortable for you. I like to hold my pick a little bit like a pencil. So I place it in between my thumb and my forefinger and I hold it almost sort of 90 degrees to where my finger sits, like so. To get started, we're going to use a nice, easy beginner exercise just to get our hands talking to each other. It's really important. We need both hands coordinated before we start moving on to the advanced stuff. So a nice easy exercise. We're gonna number our fingers, one, two, three, and four, and each finger is going to be assigned to a fret. So frets are one, two, three, four, and so on. And we've got dots on top to help us. We've got dots on my guitar on fret three, fret five, fret seven, fret nine, and we've got two dots indicating fret 12. Now, for this exercise, we're going to start on the low E string. You're gonna place your first finger on fret one, remembering to keep that thumb on the middle or the back of the neck to get a nice grip. Fret one, and to pick that low Eastring for me. Like so. We're then go to introduce our middle finger finger two, and that's gonna go onto fret two. Next, move it onto fret three with our third finger, and then finally onto fret four with our pinky. So that will give you one, two, three, four, like so. You're then gonna repeat this step for the other six strings. Like so. Notice my fingers are in the middle of these fret wires here. We've got no buzz. We've got a nice clean sound. If you are facing buzz like s, adjust your finger, adjust your grip. You're either too close to that fret wire or you're simply just not pressing hard enough. Don't press too hard, though. You don't want to hurt yourself. Picks, nice light down picks. We don't want to beat the guitar up like so. Nice gentle. Slightly slow at a comfortable speed and slowly increase the speed, just to get your hands talking together. Once you've done that, let's try going backwards. I'd use this as a nice, easy warm up exercise just to get our hands talking to each other every time we pick up the guitar. And we're going to progressively make that exercise harder to introduce new techniques as we. 4. Understanding TAB: Okay, let's understand how to read tab. The tab is a great easy way to illustrate all the notes on the fretboard so you can learn your songs nice and quickly without having to read any sheet music. And you'll find it on all online websites when you actually look at how to learn a song. So, in its basic form, we have got six lines, and each line represents a string. So, how is that? One, two, three, four, five, six. Bottom line is our low E string. Now we got A, D, G, B, and E. And on the tab, they're simply going to put numbers for which frat you need to press. So if I'm going to write a little riff, let's go, three, five, three. Five, three, that'll do. So on our low E string, we would simply fret fret three, fret five, and then we'd fret fret three on the A string. Now, the only problem with tab is it doesn't give you any rhythms to play. So it's a little bit of guesswork. It's quite often accompanied with the sheet music above, so you can clearly see what rhythms you're supposed to be playing. But on a lot of online websites, you're not going to get that rhythmic notation. Now, a couple of quick little articulations that can be found in tab if I put that little sort of joining lining between there, it would mean a hammer on. We're going from fret three to fret five. We're going to go up in pitch, so we're going to hammer on. Whereas if I write up here, for example, if I go 53, and I do that, that'll be a pull off. Now, there's a few ways in which we not string bends on tab. So if I'm on fret 12 and I want to bend up to fret 14 on the E string, I write my 12. In brackets, I'd put 14. That's the destination note. And then we'd have a little arrow here with four indicating four bend. So I'm starting on fret 12 and I'm bending up to the pitch of fret 14. But we've also got half bends and little quarter note bends just for a little bit more articulation. So they would simply be described with an arrow and half and an arrow and a quarter, pretty self explanatory. So to notate a chord, if I were to play a G five, we'd simply write the notes on top of each other like so. If we wanted to then palmute the note, we'd write PM underneath, and we usually have some dotted lines to indicate how long the palute lasts for. If we want to notate a harmonic, specifically a pinched harmonic, if I put one here at, say, fret five, we'd put it in a little diamond like so. If it was a natural harmonic, we'd write NH above. 5. Understanding Chord Diagrams: Going to move on to learning chords, but before we do so, we first need to understand what chord is. A chord is simply one or more note played at the same time. That's one note on its own. It's not a chord. It's great for melodies, but not so much for adding extra harmony and reinforcement in a sop. I'm going to build on that by adding some extra notes. And I have more than one note playing at the same time, giving us our chord. Now, in this course, we've got some basic chord diagrams to help you learn your nine essential chords. To read these diagrams, it's like you've taken your guitar and stood it upright, just like so. At the top of your diagram, you've got a thick black line, and that represents the nut of the guitar right here. And you've then got six vertical lines representing your strings. On your right hand side, you've got the lower Etring moving over to the far left where you've got your high Etring. Now on these diagrams, we've placed colored dots which indicate where your fingers need to go. So for example, on an A major chord, we've got an X on this first string, the low E string because we're not playing that string, and we've got a dot right here up on the nut to indicate an open string. We've then got two dots on the D string and the G string at fret two, and another dot on the B string at fret one. We've then got a final dot up on the nut again of the high E string indicating an open string. Now, we've also color coded these to indicate what notes are involved in the cord, but don't worry about that yet. We'll come to that in a later video. 6. Major Chords: Look at some easy chords to get you guys playing some songs. Now, before I start, there are two main types of chords. We've got major chords, and we've got minor chords. Major chords have a happy sound. They're really light, they're really airy. They sound quite cheery. Whereas your minor chords sound really sad. Now, we're going to start learning some of these, but first let me give you a little example. Here's a major chord. Here, it's got a nice happy sound to it. Let me give you a few. They sound quite positive. Here's a few minor chords. They have a darker sound to them. The sounds sad. Let's compare the two it's right next each other a major and a minor. Here's the major. And here's the minor. Here the difference. Really important skill to be able to recognize the difference between major and minor. So as you play in these chords, listen out and try and work them out for yourself, as well. Now, let's start with a nice easy chord. We'll start with the A major chord. Remember, major means happy. We're going to use these first three fingers, our index finger, our middle finger, and our ring finger. Now starting on the D string. That's his third string here. Take our first finger and place that in fret two. Mm that know there. We're then go to take our middle finger, and that's going to go directly underneath on the G string at fret two. And finally, you're going to take your ring finger, and that's going to go on fret two of the B string. So you're going to get these three fingers here in a nice line. When playing chords, make sure you're right upon those fingertips because we have a few other strings here that we don't want to mute with our fingers. We want those to ring out sound quite nice. If I line my fingers flat like, so gonna get that sort of sound. We're not going to get the full chord. So nice up on your fingertips. My wrists below the neck there, and my thumb is nice and flat on the back to give me something nice and firm to grip against. Now we're going to start this A chord strumming from the A string, this second string here. We're going to strum through all five of those strings. L so. I'd recommend once you've got your finger in playing the chord like that, like so. And in picking through the individual strings. Just to check all the notes are ringing out. If you've got any slight buzzing, adjust your fingers accordingly so you can get the proper note. Once you've done that, I'd always recommend taking your fingers off and give them a little shake shake them out. You've lost the shape. Forget about the shape. It's gone. Shake your hands out, and we'll approach the shape again just to try and, you know, get our heads and our fingers used to play in these shapes. This is really alien for new players, and it's gonna take a little while for you guys to work out how your fingers are going to work, how to work with the guitar. So we're gonna try that again, all three fingers. We've got fret the D string, G string, and B string. And there's an A major chord. Moving on. Let's take a look at the D major chord. Take your first finger, and that's gonna go on fret two of that G string right there. We're then go to take our middle finger, and we're gonna skip a string. We're gonna come all the way down to this high E string here. And that's also gonna go on fret two. So we've got fret two with the G and fret two with the E. Finally, take your ring finger, and that's going to go right there in fret three of the B string. It's going to fill that gap. Like, so I'm going to strum from the D string. Just give us that nice D major cord right there. Moving on to an E major chord. One of my favorites. Gonna use all six strings. Start with your middle finger, and that's gonna go on fret two of the A string. Next take your ring finger and place that on fret two of the D string just underneath. And then with your first finger, you're going to place that on fret one of the G string right there. Remember to keep your thumb on the back. Like so. So you've got a nice grip and keep all of your fingers right up on their fingertips so you're not touching any of the other strings. They give all six strings a good strum. H. Let's give you that nice E major cord. Moving on, the C major cord. This one's a little bit of a stretch. So bear with me. Start with your ring finger and place that on fret three of that A string. We're then go to take our middle finger and place that on fret two of the D string. And your first finger is going to go on fret one of that B string. Now, this one's really important to keep those fingers up on your fingertips because we've got that open G string there, and we don't want any of our fingers muting the string. So nice up on your fingertips, thumb and good placement on the back, wrist slightly underneath the neck, and you gonna strum again from the A string. It's a C major cord. G major next. Another big stretch, but a great siding cord. Start with your middle finger and place that on the low E string at fret three. Your first finger is then going to go on fret two of our A string. And finally, your ring finger is going to stretch all the way to that high E string there on fret three. Really important with this cord, again, like the C major cord to keep your fingers nice enough on their fingertips, so we're not muting any of those middle strings. So the final cord we're going to address, so you've got your nine essential beginner cords is the F major chord. It's a little bit like the C major chord. So let's start with that first. With my C major chord, I'm simply going to move my ring and my middle finger down one string. So you've instead got your ring finger on fret three of the D and your middle finger on fret two of the G. That gives you this nice shape here with all three fingers in a line. If you want for an extra little challenge, you could lie this first finger flat to play both the first fret of the E and the B string there. But don't worry if you can't quite make that yet, you can just fret that B string on its own. There's your F major chord. 7. Minor Chords: Some basic major chords. We'll next move on to a few minor chords, just to get you guys started in some songs. Starting now with some minor chords, we'll take a look at the A minor chord. The A minor chord is a little bit like that E major chord we learned earlier. It's the same shape. So let's start there. Let's start with that E major chord. Just as a quick reminder, I've got my middle finger on the A, ring finger on the two of the D, and first finger on one of the G. Now once we've got that shape, move everything down one string. So our middle finger is now on the D. O ring fingers on the G, and our first finger is on the B string at fret one. Same shapes different string. And we're going to strum that from the A string. It's that A minor chord. The major. Here's the minor. Practice going between the two. You'll hear the sound between the major and the minor. We've got A major and into A minor. Next, let's get the D minor chord. Start with that middle finger. Place that on fret two of the G string. Your ring finger on fret three of the B and first fingers going to go on fret one of the E string, just like so. And like the D major chord, strum from that D string. Once again, let's go back and forth between the major and the minor. So D major and D minor. The final minor chord we're going to look at today is the E minor chord. Really easy. Going to take your middle finger, place on fret two of the A string, and your ring finger goes on fret two of the D string. Now, this time, unlike the E major chord, where we had our first finger on fret one of the G, we're not going to use that. We're going to leave it as an open ringing G string. We're just going to use those two fingers there. So here's the major and here's the minor. 8. How To Practice Chords: I've said, these chords are fundamental to getting you started on guitar. They're great place to start learning chords, and we're going to use these shapes later to unlock the rest of the fretboard. Practice these chords slowly, get them under your fingertips and try and memorize them as they're really, really important. Practice going between the major and the minor, as we've done. And also practice transitioning between those chords. Let's do C to G to D. Like so. Come up with different combinations, write down as many as you can think of, and just try playing between different chords. It's those transitions are going to be key to playing at speed in songs. Just go back and forth between the two until you're comfortable. Once you've done that, move on to the next lesson. 9. Transitioning Between Chords: Something I see a lot of new students struggle with is transitioning between chords, when trying to play these strumming patterns. And the reason for this is because students believe they need to take their fingers off of every string when transitioning between chord. So, for example, if I'm playing a decord and I transition to a G chord, quite frequently, I'll see this. So much wasted time between the cords not necessary. However, it's really important to know that some of these open cords share similar notes. So we can actually transition between some of these cords without removing all of our fingers. If we take a look at an A minor cord and we transition to a C, we notice that our first finger on the B string doesn't need to move. It stays on that first fret. Now, keeping fingers in place when transitioning between cords is a great way of speeding up cord transitions. That, for example, is much faster than that. And it's gonna help add some uniformity to your playing. Spend some time with your beginner chords and see if you can find which chords share the same notes. Once you've found those cords, practice transitioning between them so you can learn the muscle memory of keeping fingers in the same place. Much faster than taking your hand off between each cord. 10. Basic Strumming Patterns: Now we've learnt some basic chords. Let's teach you a few easy strumming patterns to get you playing along to your favorite songs. Now let's take a nice easy chord progression, C, A minor, F, and G. Now, let's first begin with just some nice easy downstrokes. When you strum, you want your movements come from your elbow, not your wrist. So you get a nice sweeping motion. And the aim is to keep our wrist moving at all times. That's going to help keep us in time as we get to more advanced strumming patterns. So on the C, give us a nice four clear downstrokes. And as you can see there, my strum came from the elbow, not the wrist. We move on to A minor. F, and G. Once you've got that, let's try it with smock strokes. Once you've mastered both down and upstrokes, let's put them together to have a nice easy down up down up pattern. Remember, strong from the elbow, not from the wrist, and try and keep that arm moving at all time to help keep you in time. Now you've mastered that. We'll move on to some more advanced struming patterns. You're gonna find these druming patterns in a few of your favorite popular songs. We'll start with down, down, up, up, down up. Sounds complicated, we'll put a little strumming pattern up here as well. Mm Nice and slow together. Down, down, up, up, down, up. Now, you'll notice we've got two ups together. Down, down, up, up, down, up. You need to keep your arm moving whilst playing that pattern to help keep you in time and keep everything nice in uniform. So if you'll notice, I'll do an imaginary down stroke to help keep me in time. Down, down, up. Down, but don't strum, up, down. Up. This is where it gets a little bit difficult, keeping this arm going all times, even when you're not playing. Down, down, up, down, but don't strum, up, down, up. So, to make things easier for you, we've notated all the strumming patterns down below. Now we've used two symbols to indicate downstrokes and upstrokes. This here would be an N, and that would indicate a downstroke. This here is a V, and that indicates an upstroke. So in a strumming pattern that involves down up, down up, it would look like this with Ns and Vs. Now, if a symbol is placed in a bracket like so, you still make that strum movement, but you don't actually strum the strings. And that's really important in the more advanced strumming patterns when we want to keep this R moving to keep us in time, but we don't necessarily always want to be strumming those strings. 11. Understanding Bar Chords: Now going to move on to bar chords. Now this is something that beginner guitar players really struggle with it requires a lot of strength out of your fingers, but it is something that's going to take your plane to the next level and begin unlocking this fretboard. Bar chords require all four fingers and a lot of strength in your thumb. You will find that as you play bar chords further up the neck, you're going to require less pressure because you're further from this nut. So I'm going to start playing bar chords up here to make it easier for you guys, and we can slowly work it down to a harder barcord down here. Now, we've got two shapes for our major and our minor chords. We're going to start on the E string with a major barchord and we're going to start it right here at the fifth fret. It's called a bar chord because we're going to bar all six strings with our first finger. When I say bar, I mean, we're going to place our first finger across all six strings pressing down. Try this on your own without adding any extra fingers, just so you can feel the grip needed between your thumb and your forefinger. You want each note to ring out nice and clearly. This can be hard. Don't worry if you can't get it first time. Take your time with it and build up the strength in your hands. Once you've got this bar, we'll then add our extra fingers. We're going to start with our ring finger. Now we're going to place our ring finger on fret seven here of the A string, and our pinky finger is going to go directly underneath it at fret seven on the D. We're then go to take our middle finger and place that there on fret six of the G string, and that's going to give us our major barchord. To make this bar cord minor, all we have to do is take that middle finger off. Students often find minor bar cords a little bit harder than major because of that G string. I often see students raising their first finger in a slight arc when trying a bar. It's really important to get a nice flat line across those six strings to ensure each string is placed down. Properly. There's our major and you take off the middle finger for your minor. Moving on to the A string, we've also got two different major and minor shapes. We're going to start by barring from the fifth fret again, but only this time on the A string. Now for the major shape, we're going to use all three fingers, and it's going to resemble an A major chord that we started play down here before. So let's have our bar. We're going to place our middle finger on fret seven of the D, ring finger on fret seven of the G, and pinky finger on fret seven of the B. See, I muted that e string now accidently. It's really important to check each string as you pick through the cord just to make sure none of your fingers are blocking any other strings. Quite a hard shape this one, and it does put a little bit of strain on the wrist. So like I said before, take your time with it and build up. Some placements really, really important here, making sure that you're pushing from this muscle here, not from your wrist. And if I turn, you can see how my thumb sits on the back like so. So there's your major shape. We're now going to play a minor shape, and our minor shape looks a little bit like the major shape on the E string. So start again with that bar on the fifth fret. And we're gonna take our ring finger and our pinky and we're gonna put them on fret seven of the D string and the G string. Then go to add our middle finger onto the B string at fret six. And there's your minor barchord. Here's the major. And here's the minor. So to recap, we've got both a major and a minor barcord shape on both the E string and the A string. Here's the major on the E, and here's the minor on the E. The major on the A and the minor on the A. Try moving these shapes around the fretboard, allowing you to play different chords. One thing to mention with this major Barkle shape on the A string is I often use my ring finger to just bar these three strings right here. Personally find it a little bit easier, and it frees up my other fingers to our cord embellishments, which I'll touch on later. Give it a go, see if you can get it under your fingers, but not to worry, there's nothing wrong with using these three fingers right here. 12. 'Hot Rock' Play-through (Assessment Track): So now we've covered all of our basic chords, our posture, our hand placement, and a few warm up exercises to build our finger strength. Let's put all of that together into a technical piece that I've written to really put into practice what we've just learned. In this video, I'm going to give you a quick little play through, and in the next video, we'll talk about how to actually learn this song. You're then going to submit a recording of yourself to me so I can provide feedback and help you further along in your journey. 13. Understand - 'Hot Rock' (Assessment Track): Okay, now let's learn how to actually play this song. Now, it only contains the open chords that we've covered in this lesson, so there won't be anything new. All we're going to do is apply what we've learned in the course. So Section one or section A, contains an chord, a G chord, a decord and then a C chord. Okay. Now we're going to break this down bar for bar, right? So our first bar sounds like cell. So all I'm doing there is transitioning from an E chord, and I'm strumming that twice, down up. And then on a down stroke, I'm playing the G. So down, up, down. Now, it's worth practicing transitioning between those chords so you can get the speed. And a really good tip is to slow this song down. There's loads of useful websites online where you can slow down backing tracks, and then you can gradually increase the speed until you can get it up to MAX speed and you're comfortable. So there's our first bar. Our second bar starts on a D and transitions to a C. Now, our D, we're going to strum down and then up holding the first chord a little bit longer. And the down stroke on a C. If you wanted to count that in semiquavers, it would be one, two, and four. So if I play our introsection, whilst I count out loud, it's gonna sound like one, two, three, four, and one, two. And four and one, two, three, four, one, two, four, and. Now, you're gonna play that three times until we move on to a G chord. Now, rhythmically, we're gonna came. One and two, three, four, and you want to strum up on the upbeats. So general rule of thumb is on strong beats, beats one, two, three, and four. We use a downstroke. And our upbeats which s, we use upstrokes. So one and two, and four. And then we move on to an A chord, an A major chord, where we're going to strum in eighth notes or quavers, and we've got a crescendo market on our music, so we're going to start slow, start quiet. And we're gonna increase in volume, right? And we're going to count one and two. And I really want to hear that crescendo in volume, right? Really get louder. Brilliant. So that would be section A. Section B is our chorus section. Now, this is a little bit trickier because our chords move a touch faster, so you really want to make sure you've got those shapes nailed before you tackle this, okay? Our first bar is like before, is an E to a G. So I'm going to strum down on my es, down, down, move to a G. And then transition back to an E. My next bar, I'm then gonna go EAG. This is a little bit trickier. Eh. And if I count through up that B section one and 41 and two. Three and four, one, two, three, four, two, three, and four. We're going to repeat that three times until we come to sort of our exit section of this B section, right? So we're going to play look four E, GE, and then we're going to strum down on a C chord down up like our pattern from Section A one and then you're gonna come down on a D chord. Okay, our bridge or C section of this tune. So to play this, we're going to start on a decord and we're going to strum down up because we're counting in quavers, one, and then we're going to move to a G. And then on beat four, you're gonna play another D. One, two, three, and four. Okay. And then we're going to play C one and two and four. And then a D there on the upbeat, one, two, three, four. So this section sounds like Now, we're going to repeat this three times until we move on to a section we've looked at before, we've moved to our G, and then to our a chord. And remember that crescendo build. Now, you'll notice in the tab that we've got a first and second time repeat. What this means is we play everything once and we play our first time repeat first, obviously. Then when we go back and repeat our section because we've got those repeat markings, you're going to play everything up until you hit that first time repeat. Now you're going to skip that and you're going to come back in on Section two, our second time repeat. And it's a really great way of notating two sort of repeating sections that have got alternative ending. So really make sure you follow the music nice and carefully as you play through that section. Counting is really, really important when playing along to a song, and it is a difficult still skill to master. You might notice that whilst I'm playing along, I'm also tapping my foot. So it's really important to try and internalize that pulse. So I'm tapping my foot along to the beat. I'm counting in my head, one, two, three, four, and I'm playing these chords or to try and lock myself in nice and tight to that music. Now, as you play through any song, it's really important to listen to the other instruments around you and not just what you're playing yourself. I often tend to listen to the drums more than anything. It's going to help keep me in time and lock me in with the band. Really pay attention to that kick drum, the snare, and the high hat, as that's going to give you your clear defined beats. You can then lock in your guitar with the other instruments around that nice and easily.