The Biggest Beginner Mistakes: Best Guitar Tips for Beginners
One of the first tips you’ll encounter when learning guitar is to use songbooks. These usually feature lyrics with chords printed above certain words.
These days, most people find this material online through websites like e-chords or Ultimate Guitar, or even better, in Spytunes’ songbook!
In some books and on some websites, you’ll see the chords displayed as images in small boxes.
To make sense of this, you’ll need to be familiar with the song itself, as there’s no indication of tempo, time, key signature, or any guidance on what to play or sing once you’ve fretted the chords and semi-memorised the lyrics.
If you spend several years learning this way, you might find that you:
- Memorise and recognise chords as individual shapes.
- Come up with your own versions of famous songs.
- Build up a personal repertoire.
These are great qualities to have. Being creative with your arrangements is good practice for when you eventually write your own songs or jam with others.
However, it won’t necessarily make you great at:
- Playing parts exactly like on the record
- Writing and reading your own parts
- Fully understanding the harmony of each song
- Using different strumming patterns for different songs and sections
Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started Playing the Guitar
The main issue with “just learning more songs” is that you never dive deep enough to understand how each song is constructed and how it works harmonically.
This becomes problematic because without this understanding, it’s impossible to apply the knowledge gained from one song to the next.
For beginners, time is often not spent on fully developing a great guitar part with the chords at hand.
If you don’t understand how the song is constructed, it can be difficult to craft your own parts without relying on trial and error, followed by writing out your part in TAB and memorising it.
Breaking away from this cycle of “learning more songs” and collecting TABs, with the hope that the repetition will somehow make you better, is a common experience. If you’ve found yourself thinking this way, you’re not alone!
While building a repertoire to play with other musicians is important, what you miss by not digging deeper is learning to view music as a language.
What you lose is the ability to truly “speak music” and the confidence to know exactly what you’re doing.
Roadmap to Your Guitar Journey
To begin your guitar journey, the first step is to stop viewing chords as simply names and individual shapes. While understanding the shapes and names is important, the most crucial thing is recognising the number, or the Roman numeral, associated with each chord.
I remember learning Time of Your Life early on. The chords were G, C, D, and later an Em. I also recall learning Stand By Me, which used the chords C, Am, F, and G.
What I wish my teacher had pointed out to me was that these are actually the same chords, just in a different order. If I’d realised this early on, the path would have become much clearer.
You might be thinking, “But those aren’t the same chords!” But they are. They’re just in two different keys.
For example, if I played Stand By Me in G (the same key as Time of Your Life), the progression would be G, Em, C, D. These are the same chords, just arranged differently.
Understanding key signatures and viewing chords as numbers is often overlooked, and too much emphasis is placed on learning barre chords right away. But don’t rush ahead like that.
Instead, take the songs you already know and figure out what key they’re in and what each chord represents as a Roman numeral.
What you’ll discover is that each Roman numeral carries a particular sound. This is the first step towards truly understanding music as a language.
Overlooking this concept is one of the biggest mistakes beginners make when learning songs on the acoustic guitar.
As you’ll find in the beginner course, we only need to learn nine songs before moving on to become intermediate players. Personally, I “learned” over a hundred songs before I started exploring barre chords. This took me several years, and in hindsight, it was unnecessary.
The Language of Rhythm
One often overlooked aspect of guitar playing is rhythm. Many beginners tend to rely on one or two strumming patterns, applying them to every song they encounter. While this is common, it’s also unnecessary and, in many ways, limiting.
Songbooks, chord lyric sheets, and TAB sites typically ignore rhythm, which makes it easy for beginners to assume that strumming patterns are the key. However, nothing could be further from the truth.
On the guitar, rhythm is executed through a combination of downstrokes and upstrokes.
Looking back, I wish my early teachers had emphasised that rhythm should be played with a pendulum-like motion of the right hand. Had I understood this concept early on, all rhythms could have been easily translated into rhythmic symbols.
This idea is actually so simple that in the beginner course, just nine songs and fifteen strumming pattern exercises are all it takes to get you started.
Once you can master upstrokes and downstrokes and understand how to notate them, playing rhythms, writing them out, and even creating your own variations becomes incredibly easy.
The Biggest Beginner Mistakes: A Summary
Looking back, these were the biggest mistakes I made as a beginner:
- Viewing and remembering chords as individual shapes or images
- Not delving deep enough to fully understand each song’s structure
- Not recognising chords as Roman numerals and understanding their role in a key
- Failing to understand, read, and write strumming patterns effectively
Since my early days as a beginner, over 40 years ago, I’ve been dedicated to improving guitar tuition, striving to help others avoid these common pitfalls.
