Whether you’re looking to learn how to play guitar as an amateur or professional, there are core basics that need to be addressed before progressing into more advanced concepts. Many beginners are tempted to jump right into learning famous riffs or songs, but this can often cause frustration when your fingers start to hurt and the resulting chords don’t sound quite right. Getting your core basics down can take months of seemingly slow process and sore fingertips, but it’s vitally important for long-term success.

The first few Guitar lesson should cover the physical construction of the guitar, different types of guitars and how to hold and position your hand on the fretboard. It’s also a good idea to teach the student the guitar string names and basic strumming techniques.

Guitar chords are a great place to start for beginner guitarists. Introduce the student to open and power chord shapes (G, C, D, E, A, and F). Also, give them a list of easy guitar songs to play along with and a few tabs that show how to break the chords down into arpeggios. Emphasize the importance of getting a clear sound out of each string by pointing out that not all notes will resonate and that it’s okay to hit a few sour notes along the way.

After getting a feel for the strings and basic chords, it’s time to move into some scales and more advanced rhythm. Emphasize the underlying patterns in each scale and how they apply to chords as well. Then, have the student practice playing each scale both by themselves and as part of a chord progression. This will help the student to get a feel for how scales are used in music and will help them to begin learning how to improvise.

Next, go over intervals and how they relate to chords and the fretboard spacing. Be sure to illustrate the difference between major and minor intervals so that the student knows how to distinguish these intervals from each other. This will prepare the student to start experimenting with their own melodies and chord progressions and will make it much easier for them to learn advanced lead guitar segments.

There are a lot of different guitar lesson websites out there, but the best ones are those that offer video lessons with routinely updated content and a community. Those that focus solely on text or static media should be avoided, as they will only confuse the learning process by making it more difficult to keep track of what’s being taught.

Many people find it difficult to make their first chords using the left hand, as they require a little bit of strength to get the fingers to optimise position and pressure in order to extract a clean sound from the strings. This is normal, and the important thing is to keep at it. Eventually the fingers will get used to this and it will become easier.

It is also worth taking some time to learn the names of the strings and the order in which they appear on the guitar, as this will help to make it easier to remember how to play certain chords. It is also a good idea to understand the difference between various types of guitar picks, as this can make a significant impact on the tone that is produced.