Learning how to play the guitar is really not as easy as most people believe. You must learn basic theory, plenty of chords that can be quite tricky to master, and even how to move between chords quick enough to put a song together. However, once you begin to get the hang of these basics, you will know all of your hard work was well worth the effort. You will be able to play your favorite songs any time you want without even thinking about it. Learning will be even quicker if you can avoid making the following four common beginner mistakes:

Trying To Move Too Quickly: I know, this one is no fun, but you cannot move too quickly through all of the basics just to get to the good songs and chords; your playing will suffer. You have to go through the boring stuff and master it, not just skim over it and move on, or it can halt your progress later on. Take your time and learn your scales, major and minor, learn how to read the notes, and do not rely just on the guitar tablature. Play around with finger picking; memorize it and practice everything. Do not worry; the good stuff will come soon enough.

Getting Caught Out By Barre Chords: Barre chords are the nemesis of most beginners, and it took me months to get the hang of them. These are the chords where one finger has to lie across a lot of different strings, and they are a real pain to start with! A lot of people give up when they reach this point, they can’t get the hang of them and they either obsess about them and don’t learn anything else, or get frustrated and stop completely.

A better way to proceed is to practice barre chords daily, but to also learn other things at the same time. This will allow you to devote half of your practice sessions to them, and half to new things. You will be moving forward, which will keep you from getting frustrated and once you do master barres, you will have learned plenty of new skills as well.

Ignoring Rhythm: Playing with a metronome might not seem cool, but it is crucial to get you used to sticking to the rhythm of the song. A lot of people just play a song how they think it should sound, with no appreciation of the actual rhythm. You can get away with that by yourself and it sounds ok, but if you try to play with anyone else, or play along to a backing track etc, then suddenly you will realize you speed up on the chorus, or you are playing way too slowly.

Sloppy Practice: Don’t let your practice sessions get sloppy, aim for quality every time and you will progress a lot faster. Don’t try to play too fast and ignore it when you make some mistakes, instead concentrate and make sure every note and chord is perfect before you speed things up. If you do allow your practice to get sloppy then it will show through in your playing.

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