Teach Yourself Guitar | Discover Easy Guitar Songs, Guitar Chords, and Guitar Scales

Several years ago, I began learning how to play guitar.

Although I have taken formal guitar lessons for several months, I have not done so in many years because I firmly believe that you can teach yourself guitar, and I have many friends who are top-notch guitar players and so I have been able to learn guitar from them, too.

If you have friends who you can learn from, or even if you are forced to completely teach yourself guitar on your own, you can do it and it is not as tough as you might think, but you just need to know the basics of what is involved with playing the guitar.

And of course, having a quality guitar will help inspire you to continue playing and you will feel like you have a better sound with a quality instrument that with a beginner guitar. So if you are serious about learning guitar, then I'd encourage you to invest in a good intermediate or advanced guitar right off the bat, because you will be happier with it for much longer than you will with something low quality.

There is so much to learn when it comes to teaching yourself guitar, but you have to start with the basics: scales, chords and songs.

When you are starting to teach yourself guitar, the first thing that you will need to learn are scales, because scales are the basic building blocks which make up all of the rest of the material that you are going to play on the guitar.

Scales are basically a collection of notes that are ordered by their pitch and have definite relationships to one another.

There are many types of scales, and many different relationships between the notes in scales, but the most basic scales that you will probably want to start with when you are teaching yourself guitar are major and minor scales.

Major and minor scales both contain seven notes. When you get to the eighth note in the scale, it is the same note as the first one, but is twice the original note's frequency and is called the "octave" of the first. So anytime you are playing scales you can go up as many octaves as you want, and after every seven notes you will be one octave higher but playing the same notes. Each successive octave is twice the frequency of the octave before it, and so on and so forth.

There are many good books which you can find that will help you learn scales. I'd recommend getting one of these if you want to make any serious headway with learning the guitar, as it is very difficult to learn scales without some sort of visual representation. However, once you get the basic concept down that scales are composed of a certain notes and that all of these notes have a relationship to one another, learning scales becomes easy, and is one of the less challenging things you will have to do when you are learning how to teach yourself guitar.

The idea that a scale can be continued for many octaves, indefinitely, is called transposition. So each successive octave in which you are playing a scale is called "transposing the scale up the octave".

After you have taught yourself guitar scales, the next thing you will need to do as you continue to teach yourself guitar is to learn guitar chords.

Guitar chords, and all chords in general, are a collection of three or more notes which are played simultaneously, and guitar chords usually are derived from scales. That is why it is important to learn guitar scales before you learn guitar chords, because it will help you to hear the different sound possibilities for combining the different notes of the guitar.

Guitar chords are usually made by taking every other note in the scale and playing them at the same time. Because the guitar has six strings, every string has the potential to overlap the others in terms of the notes it plays, which gives you many different options for guitar chord voicings. The chord voicing means how the notes are actually stacked on top of one another and positioned when you play them, and the same chord can have many different voicings even though it will contain the same notes- they are just being played in a different order.

A guitar chord may be built off of each note in the guitar scale you are using by taking each note as the root of the chord, and then playing the third and fifth notes after it. A seventh may sometimes be added also, as well as the rest of the notes in higher octaves, but these are more complex voicings and are difficult to explain without an auditory example.

So for now, suffice it to say that a guitar chord is built by taking any of the notes in the scale that you are using and playing that note, and the third, and the fifth note after it at the same time.

So guitar chords could be thought of as playing notes 1, 3, and 5, or A, C, and E at the same time.

Guitar chords are one of the most important things to learn as you teach yourself guitar, because chords are the building blocks of songs, the same way that scales are the building blocks of chords.

So you will need to study guitar chords very well if you want to become an excellent guitarist, and remember that each chord has many different chord voicings and positions in which it can be played, so learn all of these as knowing multiple positions for each chord will help you to make logical transitions between each chord while you are playing the guitar, and will make playing songs on the guitar much easier.

Alright, so you've learned some guitar scales and some guitar chords, and now you're getting pretty good at the guitar.

You've probably been teaching yourself guitar for a few months now, and have been impressing your friends and/or your parents with random displays of virtuosity and fast tremolos and trills as all beginning guitarists are wont to do, and as I was very fond of doing when I first started to learn guitar.

However, at a certain point all of that random technical prowess stops meaning so much to you, and you probably want to learn how to do something with all of the scales and chords that you have learned. After all, did you start to teach yourself guitar so that you could be a guitar legend and a great musician, or just to mess around?

Now that you are getting to this point in your guitar playing, it is time to start learning some songs.

There are so many songs out there that are perfect for a beginning guitarist to learn, that it is really just a matter of personal taste, and what styles you are into.

I would encourage you to learn guitar songs that fit the style of music that you really want to play and write, because the first guitar songs you learn will heavily influence your guitar compositions, and will inspire you to write your own songs. Therefore, you should draw from your own influences when you are learning guitar songs.

However, you are not on your own when it comes to learning guitar songs, there are many resources that are available to help you. You can find many guitar websites that offer guitar tablature, which is a system of showing guitar notes so that you can learn guitar parts along with the songs. I have learned many, many guitar songs this way, and it is still a great resource for me, because some things are very tough to learn by ear, and aren't worth the time it takes to learn them by ear because someone else has already gone and done that work for you.

If you would prefer to read music, these sites also usually offer you the option to read musical notes, rather than guitar tablature. Some of you are probably already musicians who are more comfortable reading music than reading guitar tab, and I will tell you that you are brave souls, because it gets very challenging to read guitar chords when there are more than two notes involved. This is because many of the notes on the guitar fall in between the musical staves, and so you will end up reading a lot of ledger lines while you play. For this reason, guitar tab is generally more popular among guitarists, even for those who are proficient in reading music.

As you teach yourself guitar, you will find that there are also many helpful books out there with songs tabbed out in them, too. I prefer to buy books at this point, because you know that you are getting the official guitar tabs, and that they are going to be accurate. Many online guitar tabs are about seventy-five percent accurate, but are missing key notes.

Learning guitar songs and guitar tab are the most important thing you will do when you are teaching yourself guitar, and by the time that you have learned fifty to one hundred songs, you will be quite confident and feel that you are a real guitarists. From this point, the sky is the limit, and I'd encourage you to branch out as much as possible and try to learn several different guitar styles, as this will only make your core guitar playing that much more solid.

I hope that this guide has empowered you to Teach Yourself Guitar!