Have you ever wondered how much time it took your favorite artist to become great at playing guitar? Maybe you have seen one of your favorite artists play live music and it has inspired you.
Now, you wonder how hard is it to learn guitar? Or maybe, you have been struggling at learning that guitar, and you wonder if it really is hard.
Music is a language that could be expressed using your voice or any musical instrument. It could be learned and practiced until it becomes a natural language.
But really, how hard is it to learn to play the guitar? Let’s go over the basics and find out the degree of difficulty we are talking about!
Let’s look at the techniques how it is learned.
The Basics
Before becoming adept at something, everyone starts with nothing somewhere. No one is born with the perfect ability to sing, dance, or play musical instruments.
For some, learning comes easy, but for some, it takes more practice to become more familiar and to play accurately.
Now, let’s see what is involved in playing the guitar.
Dexterous Fretting Fingers
The standard guitar, when we speak of it bluntly, often points out a six-stringed lute.
This acoustic guitar has become very popular because, compared with many other instruments, it is quite portable.
To play guitar, you need to have dexterous fingers.
The guitar neck has multiple frets that need to be fingered using the tips of your four fretting fingers.
Some barre chords would require pads of your fingers and some other unorthodox techniques would have your thumb go over the neck to reach the bass strings.
The shapes of the chord you make will not sound unless you strum or pluck the strings using your strumming hands.
That leads as to the next basic technique involved in guitar playing.
Agile Strumming Hands
To produce music, you will have to strum the strings all at once or some of it together. The rhythmic strumming patterns depend on what song you are playing.
At least, you need to know how to count up to four to learn about rhythmic strumming! Aside from the rhythmic pattern, you also need substantial arm strength to strum all day long!
The amount of force you give to every strum contributes to the overall volume of your music.
If you don’t feel that strong, don’t worry too much because you will improve your strength while playing!
Precise Plucking Fingers
Aside from strumming the guitar, there are other ways to play it.
Plucking the strings one by one, or a few strings at a time would create melodic music and is most often used in fingerstyle guitar playing.
This is the primary discipline of classical guitarists.
If you plan on taking up the classical guitar, there would be more skills and techniques involving plucking the guitar strings.
Strong Frethand Grip
Aside from precision, agility, and dexterity, having firm frethand grip would greatly help in guitar playing. Difficult chords often involve barring and this would require substantial hand strength to get clean sound.
If you lack the grip, your hands would easily fatigue while you play.
Now, if you don’t press on those strings with enough force, you may get unintended muted sound.
Some Alphabet
Aside from counting from one to four, you would also need to know how to recite the alphabet. Well, what you need is to memorize, at least, A to G! Each note on the guitar is named after the alphabet.
The basic chords, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, corresponds to a particular shape that you need to layout on the fretboard.
Sharps and Flats
If you already know about the basic guitar chords and how to lay it out on the fretboard, you will also need to learn about the sharps and flats.
It’s really not that difficult to learn about it.
It just involves moving your guitar chord one fret forward when the chord is sharp, or one fret backward when the chord is flat.
When you get familiar with this, it will come easy!
Fraction
Yes, music involves some basic math. Aside from counting up to four, you also need to know a little about fraction.
But don’t get intimidated! If you know how to divide a cake to at least 8 slices, then you won’t have a problem!
If you want to learn some fast-paced musical tracks, I wish you know how to slice a cake into 16!
Every song follows a time signature. Every measure has a set number of counts, and this is where the fraction part comes in.
The length of time you play each chord will involve dividing them into fractional parts and follow a rhythmic pattern.
If you will be playing jazz music, you would need to master odd fractions!
So, How Hard Is It?
It may seem like you need to know a lot before you could really learn to play the guitar. Seeing people who are already good at playing the guitar makes it even more intimidating!
However, if you carefully check the skills listed above, you may realize that you already know some of it!
I’m pretty sure you can count from one to four. I have no doubt that you know how to recite the alphabet.
I bet you know fraction! So, if you sum everything up, you need to study and learn some aspects of guitar playing from scratch.
Grab A Guitar
Now that you know what it takes to learn playing the guitar, what are you waiting for? You can learn how to play the guitar!
The key to learning to play any instrument is practice. Everything could be learned, as long as you are willing, of course.
Set aside time for practice. Make a schedule and stick to it! If you will give it at least half an hour every day, you will make progress.
Imagine if you could give it hours? You will be a great guitar player in no time!
References:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/zachary-stockill/learn-how-to-play-guitar-_b_5503596.html