Hi, how you doing? Justin here. Welcome to BC-101
which is: "Common Questions About Learning The Guitar
That Beginners Usually Ask". So in this quick little video clip,
I'm going to try and explain a couple of the questions that
came up time and time again on the website and e-mail and
on the forum and stuff.
Of course I'm only going to do a few questions that are
really common 'cause I probably don't know every question
that you've got, but if you want to ask it, there's a link at the
bottom of this page's website, so if you and look up BC-101
on the justinguitar.com website, you'll see the video atop
and then you see the questions as text and I'll make sure
I'll put any new questions up there. Then underneath that,
you're going to find a little question mark with a direct link
to the forum. So if you've got some other beginner's
questions, that I haven't answered here, then please go and
hit that link on the forum and it'll take you to a little place
where you can leave your question and then I might do a
Part 2 of this if I've got enough questions. Either that or I'll
just answer it in the text below this, on the website.
So, Really Common Questions. Let's get some out of the
way and get them going. Most people really want to know:
"How long is it going to take me to learn to play guitar?"
Well unfortunately, how long is a piece of string?
It's different for everybody. There's not really one kind of set
time frame for people. I generally find that within six months,
most people can kind of play some tunes. I tend to think of it
in terms of hours of practice, so it tends to be about five hours of practice
and then people can usually play some songs.
Now I don't mean like five hours all in one go right,
that isn't going to work. I'm talking about doing, say,
15 minutes a day, four times a week or five times a week, for
four, five weeks. That kind of thing. And you should be able
to kind of play some tunes, you might be still struggling with
your strumming and stuff. It really is different for different
people though, unfortunately. There is such a thing as
natural aptitude and some people do pick it up a little bit quicker.
But generally, it's about how much time you actually
spend practicing depends on how fast you get kind of good.
The other differential there is kids, children under sixteen or
eightteen or whatever tend to learn two or three to ten times
faster than adults. So if you're fifty and you're learning
guitar for the first time, it's going to take you a lot longer
than if you're fifteen. That's just the truth, I don't know
exactly why that is. You'd think that older people would learn
stuff faster but they don't, I don't know why that is.
Young kinds just totally lick it.
So, next question: "How often do you need to practice?"
Well, what I would recommend is that you try and practice
four to five times a week, for about fifteen minutes. That's
kind of what I reckon is the optimal amount for a beginner
guitar player. If you practice too much more than that, you're
going to get: your hands are going to kind of get sore and
you risk burning yourself out a bit. So in the early stages,
you're better off not going over the top and practicing loads,
just try and get a nice, regular amount of practice in.
Fifteen, twenty minutes, maybe a bit more if you're really
digging it, whatever. But that kind of amount is the amount
I think you should be practicing.
It's a lot, lot better to practice a little bit every day than to try
and hit it all in one go. So, if you were doing, say,
15 minutes a day, 4 times during the week, that's going to be
loads better than trying to do, not doing any all week and
then do two hours practice on a Saturday, right? So, I know
a lot of people have work commitments and stuff, and school
or whatever. But if you can try and find a little bit , like ten,
fifteen minutes of practice every day, that would be wicked.
That's a great amount and then you can start to up the
amount that you practice as you get into it more and more.
It's also a good idea if you have trouble finding practice,
or time to practice rather, then it's a good idea to try and
do it at a set time. So, like every day after you're home from
school or after you're back from work or in the morning.
A lot of my students have practiced in the mornings before
they go to work, you know, it's up to you. But if you struggle
then it can be a good idea to try and find the same time
every day to have a little bit of a practice session.
Um okay, another really common question: "My fingers
really hurt, should I stop?" Yeah, if your fingers really hurt,
then you should stop. Everybody, including me still,
after having played guitar for, I don't know how long it is now,
twenty-five years or something? I still get lines in my fingers
and sometimes I play so much that it hurts. So, when you
start off, remember that you're putting your nice, kind of
fleshy, soft skin down on thin pieces of metal and you're
pressing them down really hard. It's gonna hurt, right?
So it just takes a little bit of time for the skin to kind of callous up
a little bit and get a bit tougher. So, yeah, don't be that
bothered if your fingers hurt. If it's really hurting, stop. Take
a break. I'm not saying you should kind of push yourself
through so the guitar becomes some kind of torture thing.
You know, but if it's sore, just deal with it, keep going. It'll
be fine, you're not going to do yourself any damage.
But yeah, if ever something hurts, like painful, then stop
and take a break. If it's just a bit sore, that's usual I think.
It's okay to keep going.
Okay, another really common question from the Beginners
Course last time was, you know, "Oh, I wanna learn rock
guitar, what do I have to learn all these open chords for"
Or, "I only wanna play jazz guitar, I don't wanna learn rock
power chords". Now, in the course of the, ha, in the course
of my Beginners Course, you're going to learn a whole heap
of different techniques. Open chords, strumming, power
chords, fingerstyle, and probably you're not going to want to do
all of those different things in your general guitar playing career,
but they all help each other a whole lot. For example:
power chords. If you want to play jazz, right, but you don't
really want to learn rock power chords. But what you might
not realise at that early beginners stages is that
the formation of that power chord is really, kind of preparing
your hand to play barre chords. So it's really important that
you do that, you know. If you're looking at open chords
because you want to play metal and you want to play power
chords, I mean, loads of metal songs have open chords
in it as well. So, what I'm trying to show you in this Beginners
Course is all of the basic kind of foundation skills that you
need to play guitar. After you finish that, you can start to,
you know, choose this bit or I wanna do that or I want a little
more of this thing or whatever you like. But I'd really
recommend that you just start off with, you have a good go
at doing the course all the way through and make sure that
you can master all of that stuff. I think that'd be a really
good plan.
Another question: "Why isn't there very much rhythm guitar
at the first part of the course?"
Well, that's a really good question and this is one of the kind of
slightly different things I guess, about the way I teach guitar,
and rhythm is a really, really important part of playing guitar.
And it's really important that the rhythm is consistent. If you
watch people strumming, usually you'll find that their hand
moves kind of continuously so you'd have
. . .
My hand is kind of moving that same way all the time and I
then get kind of a pattern going, a strumming pattern or a
rhythm pattern, which is kind of what makes rhythm guitar
work. If in the early stages you're struggling to change
between your chords, which is very likely, in fact it's almost
certain that everyone who does this is going to struggle
a bit. If you're learning guitar for the first time, you're going
to struggle changing chords. You'd train yourself to stop
strumming. So you might go like
. . .
Stop. Change your chord, there we go, and then
. . .
And I think this is the worst thing that you can possibly do.
Because you're training your rhythm hand that it's okay to stop.
And it isn't okay to stop for your rhythm hand.
Your rhythm hand has to learn to become completely
independent. So, what I try and do is: introduce you to the
chords first, then a bit of the chord changes, speeding up
your chord changes and really working on that kind of thing.
And then once you got to the point where you can do your
chord changes fast enough, then we introduce the
strumming. So, it's just a slightly different way that I teach it
and I think it really works and I've seen people really
improve on their rhythm guitar because they're not having to
stop and muck around with the chords. So, I do recommend
this as being a good way around.
Okay, lastly: if you got any questions through this, please,
please, please, please, please don't e-mail me. I get
too many e-mails, I just can't answer them. But I've got
a forum which I go to very regularly and I answer on. So,
and especially in this early part of the release of the
Beginners Course, I'm going to be on the forum a whole lot
and taking questions, helping you guys out doing the course
So, please check the link at the bottom of BC-101 which will
link you directly to this particular lesson's forum page. Have
a look around the forum, there's loads of people there to
help and I'll be there to help as well.
So, go and check it out! There's loads of places to get help,
I'm sure you're going to enjoy this Beginners Course, 'cause
it's loads of fun. So, I think that's all we've got time for in this
lesson so I'll see you for another one, some time soon.
Later, bye bye!