Learning to Play Guitar

Learning to Play Guitar : My Story by Dene Lingard

If there's one accomplishment that I feel really good about, it’s learning to play the guitar like a pro. When I was younger, I loved to sing and play the piano, so my parents hired a private tutor, who trained me to do both. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I fell deeply in love with music, only after I discovered the “almighty” guitar. As a die-hard guitar player nowadays, I can assure you that there is no other musical instrument that can compare.

As much as I love the guitar, however, learning to play it well was not as easy as I had initially expected. Because I had experience playing the piano for many years, when I first took up the guitar, I thought I'd be able to pick it up easily. To my astonishment, it was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had to go through. From my piano lessons, I knew all about the pentatonic scale and other useful scales, and I figured I could transfer those skills to the guitar, without the need of consulting books, like guitar scales for beginners, or a live instructor. This could not have been further from the truth.

I quickly found myself consulting books at the library and purchasing DVDs to watch, all in the hope of maintaining my spirit and love for music. I'm sure that if you're trying to learn the guitar and have not found any luck so far with books or articles online, believe me, I've been there. I've read through tons of guitar books and consulted guitar tips and techniques type articles on the web, all to no avail. It's frustrating because it's really hard to read a book and play at the same time. Then again, hiring a private guitar tutor was also out of the question for me, mainly because my parents had already spent thousands on my piano lessons, and didn't really feel that the guitar was enough of a "conventional" musical instrument to be worth it.

As I was suffering from my own demise, one day, I came across a gem of a solution. I found out how to learn the guitar, not by using live instructors, not from books or articles, but from interactive pre-recorded lessons online. These were lessons that I can watch on the Internet and they were priced at very affordable rates -- it surely beat spending tons of my hard earned summer job money on books that just sat there and collected dust. Using these interactive lessons, I began to pick up guitar faster and with almost no frustration. I quickly began playing in my dorm room (I was still in college at the time) and when my parents gave me a laptop as a gift, I even carried my interactive lessons and my guitar to lecture halls; before anyone arrived at class, I would watch the lessons on my laptop and practice.

Over the course of only a few months, I was able to master many guitar scales (even some of the most advanced ones) and quite astonishingly, even began playing rock songs. This was surely one of the most exciting moments of my life. Not only was I able to play Beethoven straight out with the piano, I was now able to play Green Day like a pro. Sure, my roommates got tired of it, but I was nothing less than ecstatic.

Best of all, with these types of interactive instructors, the thing that helped me most was the fact that I was able to easily rewind if I ever got stuck. Simply watching them over and over again helped me to master the guitar faster and with more efficiency.

Learning to play the guitar from books was definitely not a contributor to my success and never got me to the level that I wanted to be with the guitar. Then again, of course, there's always room for improvement and I must admit, I still make mistakes and I'm always learning. In fact, the interactive lessons are so useful that I typically go back to them when I want to brush up on the basics -- stroking, scaling, pentatonic scale etc. They're really helpful.

So if you're just starting to learn to play the guitar, I know how you feel and how frustrating it can be, especially if you don't have anyone to guide you and if you're just depending on books. If it weren't for these online interactive lessons, I would have probably given up or possibly convinced my parents to unwillingly spend thousands more on a private tutor.