Learning to play the electric guitar has transformed dramatically over the past two decades. Aspiring guitarists today are fortunate to have access to an unprecedented wealth of resources, from online lessons and vast tablature libraries to detailed gear reviews and vibrant online communities of fellow musicians, spanning all skill levels.
While guidance from a skilled guitar teacher undoubtedly offers unique benefits, mastering the electric guitar on your own is absolutely within reach. All it takes is a spark of inspiration, a healthy dose of motivation, and the dedication to stay consistent with your practice.
This guide will equip you with the most effective tips and strategies for Learning Electric Guitar independently, setting you on the path to becoming the guitarist you’ve always dreamed of being.
Gearing Up for Success: Essential Equipment
The Electric Guitar: Choosing Your First Instrument
While starting your guitar journey with a vintage 1959 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop might be a dream, it’s not a necessity! However, investing in decent, well-playing equipment is crucial for a smoother and more enjoyable learning experience.
A guitar that is reasonably playable and stays in tune will significantly accelerate your progress in countless ways. Frustration with a poorly made instrument can quickly derail your motivation.
While every guitar possesses its own unique characteristics, several brands are known for producing reliable beginner-friendly electric guitars. Fender Squier, Epiphone, and Yamaha Pacifica are excellent starting points, offering quality and playability at accessible price points.
Remember the adage: you get what you pay for. A super-cheap $80 guitar from an online marketplace might seem tempting, but it’s likely to produce a less-than-inspiring sound and potentially hinder your learning process. Investing a bit more upfront in a reputable beginner model will pay dividends in your enjoyment and progress.
Amplification: Unleash Your Guitar’s Voice
Alongside your guitar, a functional amplifier and a dependable guitar cable are essential. Fortunately, the market today offers numerous affordable and versatile options, particularly in the realm of modeling amplifiers.
Modeling amps are a fantastic choice for beginners because they digitally recreate the sounds of a wide array of classic and contemporary amplifiers. This allows you to experiment with diverse tones and styles without breaking the bank.
You can explore the sonic landscapes of legendary amps through these modeling technologies, and then, as your ear develops and you identify your preferred tones, you can consider upgrading to a higher-end amplifier that authentically captures the sound of your favorite model.
Essential Accessories: Picks, Straps, and More
To complete your beginner electric guitar setup, you’ll need to acquire suitable guitar picks and a comfortable guitar strap. Investing in strap locks is also highly recommended. These simple devices prevent your guitar from accidentally detaching from the strap during energetic playing sessions – a small investment that can save your instrument from a potentially damaging fall!
Guitar picks are available in a vast spectrum of shapes, sizes, and thicknesses. Some are large, others small; some are thick, while others are thin. Experimentation is key here.
Consider purchasing a variety pack of different guitar picks to test out various styles. Through trial and error, you’ll discover the pick types that feel most comfortable in your hand and produce the tones you prefer.
Mastering Your Instrument: Understanding Your Gear
Take the time to thoroughly familiarize yourself with your new equipment. Delve into the owner’s manuals for your electric guitar, amplifier, cables, and any effects pedals you might have. Understanding the intricacies of your gear will empower you in numerous ways.
Knowledge of your equipment translates to greater control over your sound. You’ll be able to shape your tone more precisely and develop a clearer understanding of how to diagnose and resolve any technical issues that might arise.
Exploring the Anatomy of Your Electric Guitar
Every electric guitar, regardless of brand or model, shares fundamental components: a body, neck, frets, strings, pickups, tuning pegs, a nut, bridge, and a configuration of knobs and switches.
Understanding the function of each component is crucial. Pay particular attention to the knobs and switches on your guitar, as these are your primary tools for sculpting different tones.
For instance, if you own a Stratocaster-style guitar, it will likely feature single-coil pickups, a five-way toggle switch, and volume and tone control knobs (potentiometers).
Single-coil pickups, standard on most Stratocaster-style guitars, consist of a single magnet wrapped in copper wire, with six pole pieces extending outwards.
Compared to humbucking pickups, single-coil pickups produce a brighter, thinner, and more articulate tone, often described as “spanky.” Humbucking pickups, in contrast, utilize two magnets wrapped together in copper wire, resulting in a thicker, warmer, and higher-output sound.
Pickup Switching and Tone Shaping
Stratocaster-style guitars typically have three single-coil pickups, while Les Paul or SG-style guitars commonly feature two humbucking pickups.
The five-way toggle switch on a Stratocaster-style guitar allows you to select different pickup combinations. With the switch in the leftmost position, you activate the neck pickup (closest to the neck). Moving the switch to the rightmost position engages the bridge pickup (closest to the bridge). The three intermediate positions offer various blends of the five pickups.
On a two-pickup humbucking guitar, the toggle switch generally has three positions: neck pickup only, both pickups together, and bridge pickup only.
Sometimes, these positions are labeled “rhythm” (neck pickup) or “treble” (bridge pickup) on the toggle switch. However, don’t be constrained by these labels! Both pickup selections can be used for rhythm and lead playing, depending on your desired style and tone.
In the middle toggle position (both pickups engaged), you can use the individual volume knobs for each pickup to blend their sounds. For example, with both pickups selected, you could set the neck pickup volume to 50% and the bridge pickup volume to 100%, or vice versa, to create a wide range of tonal textures.
Experimenting with these tonal possibilities is key to unlocking the full creative potential of your electric guitar and discovering your unique sonic voice.
Tuning Up and Stringing Along: Essential Maintenance
Learning how to tune your guitar accurately is a fundamental skill at every stage of your guitar playing journey. Fortunately, tuning has become incredibly accessible thanks to numerous high-quality smartphone apps designed for guitar tuning.
Clip-on tuners, which attach directly to the headstock of your guitar, are another inexpensive and highly effective tuning solution. These tuners are incredibly convenient for quick tuning adjustments between songs, making them invaluable for practice and performance.
For those seeking a more professional setup, pedal tuners are available. These tuners are incorporated into your effects pedal signal chain, typically placed at the very beginning.
A signal chain refers to the order in which your guitar’s signal passes through effects pedals before reaching your amplifier. While there are various schools of thought on pedal order, placing your tuner first is generally considered a safe and practical approach.
Mastering the art of changing your guitar strings is another essential maintenance skill. Numerous excellent tutorial videos are readily available online to guide you through the process step-by-step.
Explore different guitar string gauges and materials as well. String gauge refers to the thickness of the strings in a set.
Lighter gauge strings are generally easier for beginners to play, requiring less finger strength for fretting and bending notes. More advanced players, particularly those in certain genres, may prefer heavier gauge strings for their thicker tone and enhanced tuning stability (intonation).
Similar to experimenting with guitar picks, trying out a range of string gauges will help you discover your personal preference in terms of feel and sound.
Deciphering Guitar Music: Tabs and Chords
The most accessible entry point to learning songs and understanding the electric guitar is mastering guitar tablature (tabs) and chord charts. Remarkably, you don’t even need to read traditional musical notation to begin playing electric guitar!
Guitar Tabs: Your Gateway to Songs
Guitar tablature is a simplified notation system designed specifically for guitar. It utilizes six horizontal lines, representing the six strings of the guitar, in a format visually similar to the five lines of a standard musical staff.
Guitar tabs are read from bottom to top. The lowest horizontal line corresponds to the thickest string, the low E string (6th string). The highest horizontal line represents the thinnest string, the high E string (1st string).
Numbers placed on these lines indicate the fret to be played on that particular string. For example, a “1” on the highest line signifies playing the first fret on the high E string:
A “5” on the lowest horizontal line indicates playing the fifth fret on the low E string:
Chord Charts: Visualizing Chords
Learning to read chord charts is another rapid and effective method for self-teaching electric guitar. Many chord charts incorporate chord diagrams, providing visual representations of how to play all the necessary chords for a particular song.
Chord diagrams might seem initially perplexing, but they become easily decipherable with a little practice. Essentially, a chord diagram is a pictorial representation of a chord shape on the guitar fretboard.
A basic chord diagram resembles a grid. It comprises six vertical lines, each representing one of the six guitar strings. When viewing a chord diagram, imagine looking down the guitar fretboard from the bridge towards the headstock. The low E string is positioned on the left, and the high E string on the right.
Horizontal lines, typically numbering from 3 to 6, represent the frets. Consider this example of a chord diagram for an E major chord in open position:
In this diagram, dots are located at the second fret of the A string, the second fret of the D string, and the first fret of the G string. These dots indicate where you should place your fingers on the fretboard. Hold down these frets with your fretting hand and strum the strings with your picking hand to produce the E major chord.
The more you practice interpreting chord charts and diagrams, the faster you’ll memorize chord shapes and the easier it will become to learn new songs quickly!
Harnessing the Power of the Internet
Today’s guitarist has access to an unparalleled abundance of online information and resources. It truly is a golden age for learning guitar. The internet provides a vast repository of learning materials, from lessons and tutorials to song transcriptions and gear reviews.
However, it’s crucial to exercise discernment and prioritize high-quality resources. Not everything you find online is accurate or effective!
Consider investing in a structured online guitar course and diligently following its curriculum. This approach provides a clear learning path, allows you to track your progress systematically, and helps you develop the ability to distinguish reliable information from misinformation.
Following a disciplined learning plan and maintaining consistency is the most reliable way to progress as a guitarist.
Choosing a Structured Learning Path
Resist the temptation to solely rely on random YouTube videos for your guitar education. While YouTube offers a wealth of guitar content, many channels lack a structured curriculum or course framework.
Avoid becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of courses available. Select one program that resonates with you and commit to completing it thoroughly before moving on to other topics.
Guitar Head offers excellent, step-by-step programs specifically designed for guitarists. Our course, ‘Guitar Exercises for Beginners,’ provides a dual benefit: it guides you in learning electric guitar and establishes a robust practice routine to accelerate your learning.
The best part? We demonstrate how to significantly enhance your guitar skills with just 10 minutes of focused practice per day. Explore the course here.
Setting Goals and Staying Focused
Self-directed learning and consistent progress require a significant degree of self-motivation and discipline. Therefore, setting realistic and achievable short-term and long-term goals is incredibly beneficial.
For example, aim to master the five positions of the minor pentatonic scale within five months, dedicating approximately one month to each position. This is a manageable goal that can be accomplished without excessive time or effort.
Establishing a Practice Routine
Developing a consistent practice routine and adhering to it is your best strategy for steady improvement. Identify a consistent time slot for daily practice and create a structured schedule to maximize your practice efficiency, avoiding aimless “noodling” for extended periods.
Begin each practice session with warm-up exercises, followed by scale practice, then chord practice, and finally, working on songs. This is just a sample structure; you can create endless variations to align with your specific goals. Consistency is the key to unlocking progress.
The Power of Listening: Developing Your Ear
Immersing yourself in music is paramount to becoming a proficient musician. You need to cultivate an understanding of how a guitar should sound in the hands of a master.
Furthermore, continuously seeking out new music is essential to maintain inspiration and fuel your ongoing skill development.
Often, stagnation in your listening habits can mirror stagnation in your guitar playing progress.
Exploring Interviews and Live Performances
Seek out interviews with your favorite guitarists to gain insights into their musical approaches and philosophies. Delve into their minds and try to understand the elements that contribute to their unique sound.
Attend live performances whenever possible – even better, actively seek out concerts to experience firsthand how the energy and atmosphere of live music shift and evolve with each note.
Mastering the Fundamentals: Building Blocks of Guitar
Regardless of your preferred musical genre, it’s imperative to master at least the basic open position and barre chord shapes, as well as fundamental major, minor, and pentatonic scale patterns.
These are the foundational building blocks of guitar technique. Studying them will establish a strong fundamental skillset applicable to virtually any playing situation.
Moreover, a solid understanding of basic chords and scales will enhance your ability to communicate effectively about guitar-related concepts with fellow musicians.
Chords in Every Key: Expanding Your Harmonic Vocabulary
Learning to play guitar chords in all twelve keys is an important step in your musical development. This is surprisingly more straightforward on guitar than on instruments like the piano. On guitar, we can utilize a system known as CAGED to transpose various chord shapes across the fretboard.
For instance, the C shape chord, when rooted on the third fret of the A string, forms a C major chord. However, by shifting this same C shape chord up two frets, so that the root now rests on the fifth fret of the A string, it transforms into a D major chord. This principle applies to all the chord shapes within the CAGED system.
Scales: Navigating Melodic Landscapes
Just as movable patterns and shapes exist for guitar chords, so too do movable patterns exist for major, minor, and pentatonic scales. For example, to play the minor pentatonic scale in all twelve keys, you only need to learn a single pattern. Then, you can transpose this pattern up and down the fretboard to match any key in which you wish to improvise.
The same principle applies to various major and minor scale patterns. This inherent movability of guitar patterns makes learning scales significantly more accessible compared to instruments like the piano, where each of the twelve major, minor, and pentatonic scales requires a distinct combination of notes and fingerings.
Refining Your Technique: Exploring Guitar-Specific Skills
Identify the signature techniques employed by your favorite guitarists and actively practice incorporating them into your own playing. Fundamental techniques to explore include slides, bends, hammer-ons, pull-offs, legato runs, sweep picking, tapping, and vibrato.
Investigate different picking styles, such as alternate picking, hybrid picking, and fingerpicking. The guitar offers a vast array of specialized techniques to explore. Discover those that resonate most strongly with your musical interests and dedicate yourself to mastering them.
Learning Songs: Internalizing the Guitar Language
As a beginner guitarist, your most effective strategy is to learn as many songs, riffs, licks, and solos as possible. This is the most direct path to internalizing the “language” of the guitar fretboard.
Like all instruments, the guitar has characteristic playing styles and idioms. It’s crucial to absorb these guitar-specific mannerisms early on so that you can internalize and master them.
Once you have a solid foundation in these fundamental guitaristic elements, you can build upon them and develop them into your own unique and expressive style!
The Metronome: Your Rhythm Training Partner
Utilizing a metronome will elevate your playing to new levels of rhythmic precision and consistency. A metronome is an invaluable practice tool, offering numerous beneficial applications.
Fortunately, many excellent metronome apps are available for free download on smartphones.
Creative Metronome Practice Techniques
The most basic metronome application is playing along with it set to all four beats in a measure. However, you can creatively modify your practice by setting the metronome to click on just one beat per measure or even on the off-beats (the “and” counts).
Think of metronome practice as rhythmic exercise. The more consistently you practice with a metronome, the stronger your internal sense of time and rhythm will become!
Recording and Self-Assessment: Critical Listening
Use a voice memo app on your smartphone or a dedicated recording device to record yourself practicing electric guitar. Listen back to your recordings critically, objectively evaluating your playing. Identify areas that require improvement and note aspects of your playing that you find pleasing.
Reflection: The Key to Growth
Listening back to your own playing is an indispensable tool for self-reflection and skill development. If you approach your self-assessment with honesty and realism, you will accelerate your progress significantly.
Demystifying Music Theory: Your Musical Roadmap
Music theory is simply a framework of concepts, tools, and terminology that musicians use to describe musical patterns and tendencies and communicate about music effectively with one another. Don’t be intimidated by music theory!
Music Theory: An Empowering Tool
Many self-taught musicians mistakenly believe that studying music theory will stifle their creativity and make their playing overly rigid or formulaic. The reality is quite the opposite!
By neglecting music theory, you are essentially limiting yourself, cutting off access to a vast universe of musical understanding and insight that could otherwise be readily available to you. Music theory, when understood and applied creatively, enhances your musical freedom and expands your expressive possibilities.
Finding Your Guitar Community: Connect and Grow
Perhaps the most crucial, yet often overlooked, aspect of learning electric guitar independently is finding a community of guitarists and musicians with whom you enjoy connecting, collaborating, and learning.
Engaging in conversations about music with fellow guitarists and musicians is the most effective way to stay inspired, discover new ideas, and expand your musical horizons.
Whether your community is primarily online or in-person, having a supportive network of fellow guitarists will accelerate your development and keep you motivated on your musical journey. Who knows, you might even form your next band!
Considering Online Guitar Courses: Structured Learning and Guidance
The sheer volume of freely available online resources might suggest that anyone can learn electric guitar independently.
However, YouTube, while valuable, isn’t always the most effective platform for structured guitar learning. It often lacks the necessary curriculum and step-by-step guidance required for systematic progress. You might find yourself jumping from one video to another without a clear learning path, hindering your overall progress.
Enrolling in a well-structured online guitar course is a significantly more efficient and rewarding approach. You’ll learn electric guitar at a much faster pace and experience greater enjoyment in your musical journey.
Consider giving our course, “Guitar Exercises for Beginners”, a try. It comprises 7 comprehensive chapters and over 100 exercises designed to guide you from beginner to proficient player. The unique aspect of this course is that it requires only 10 minutes of daily practice to significantly enhance your guitar skills. Explore the course here.
