Learning Guitar in 2024? My TOP Tips For Beginners

Congratulations. It's a new year and you finally decided that you're going to learn the guitar this year. In this video, I'm going to talk about four common mistakes that beginners make when they go and learn guitar. And if you make these mistakes, you're more likely to give up. Did you know that 80 to 90% of students who start learning guitar give up in the first 90 days? All right. Indefinitely within the first year. I don't want that to happen to you. Let's get into the first tip.

So everyone comes into the new year or into doing something new, and they're really excited and they're like, I'm gonna practice every day. I'm gonna work hard. And they say it, but they don't actually write out the schedule. And this is super important. I recently got it started with a personal trainer. And what we do, we picked out the specific days I was going to work out, and that was going to be Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Okay? So we picked four days that those were non negotiable. I have to do the work on those days no matter what. And I highly recommend as a guitar student that you get into a set schedule. This is something I talk about with my students in my seven level system. We have the perfect practice routine in there, and I give them a sheet and it's, you know, pick a practice time three to four times a week, Pick days, and in the beginning, you know your finger is going to be very, very sore. In the beginning, keep the practice sessions short. Okay? You don't have to right out of the gate, start practicing for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, eventually, if you want to, that's great. But in the beginning, I tell students, listen, 10 to 15 minutes, mainly because that's all your fingers are going to be able to handle until you develop the calluses. But pick the specific day and pick the time. Whether it's Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 9am I'm going to do my practice for 15 minutes. I always told students in my studio, try and do it earlier in the day because stuff comes up, people start calling you, emergencies come up. If you do things first thing in the morning, you're more likely to get it done. And you start the day with a real sense of accomplishment. Another huge mistake that I see beginners make, and probably one of the biggest reasons people come to me as a teacher is they don't have a blueprint. And YouTube's great. We're here on YouTube now. There's a lot of amazing free resources. There's a lot of Amazing free resources over on my website, too. But the bottom line is, if you do not have a system, if you do not have a system to follow, you're kind of haphazardly going through things, not knowing. Are you learning the right skills for where you are right now? And you know, you watch a video on YouTube and they suggest another video, but is that video the video you should be watching next? And that's why a lot of students come to me in my course in the seven level system. And whether you do my course or any other guitar teachers course here on YouTube, listen, following a bad system is better than following no system at all. Even if you have a bad system and you follow through with it consistently, you are going to make progress, you are going to see success because you are following some sort of blueprint that's giving you the steps. Hey, this is step one, this is step two, this is step three. I come from a science background. My degree, believe it or not, is not in music. So for those of you who. Who don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman, and I specialize in teaching older learners, ages 50 plus, how to play the guitar. Okay. And I do that through a system called the seven level system. And I don't have a degree in music. My degrees are actually in biology and archaeology. I worked for a pharmaceutical company for a number of years, but my passion was music and playing the guitar. And here I am. And that's what I do here. I just try to get other students to have fun with a guitar, become passionate, not bog you down with a bunch of music theory mumbo jumbo. All right? We just want to have fun and work on solid foundation. And when you have step one, step two, step three, just like in science, when I had to do an experiment, it was step one, step two, step three. You didn't do it out of order or things could go wrong pretty bad. Okay? And that's what happens with a lot of students. They're kind of on YouTube and they're pumping around to a bunch of random videos. They're learning random parts of songs. But then I get emails and they're like, you know, I've been playing guitar for a year, but I feel like I haven't really gotten that far. And I can play bits and pieces of a song, but I can't play an entire song. And that's all I really want to do is play through an entire song. So if you get a blueprint that actually teaches you the foundation of music, the foundation of how songs Work. There's really just three things you have to learn. You have to learn strumming, you have to learn chords, and you have to learn finger dexterity. So I have a lot of exercises because that's something a lot of people don't. Focus on getting the hands moving. Okay. Going from a C chord to a G chord is very, very tough if you don't have finger flexibility and finger dexterity. So that's something we work on a lot in my course. Another thing is to have clear goals. Just like we talked about earlier. I'm gonna practice really hard. That's great. What does that mean? I'm going to practice three times a week for 15 minutes, or I'm gonna practice four times a week for 20 minutes. That's a very specific goal. It's much easier to hit specific goals versus very vague and generic goals. Like, I want to play guitar. Fantastic. What does that mean? I want to be able. By the end of the year, I want to be able to play 10 songs that I love on the guitar. That is a great goal, and it's totally doable. Like I said, with the right system, you can learn songs on the guitar, especially if you keep things simple in the beginning. You know, I show students just four very, very simple chords that you can use to play thousands of songs on the guitar. Literally, you can play thousands of songs by just knowing four chords on the guitar and a couple strumming patterns. Now, I always tell people, is it going to sound exactly like the song? No. If you take a song like Hotel California by the Eagles, there's five guitar parts. I think on that song, there's four or five. And if you watch the Eagles on stage, they've got a lot of guitar players. So in the beginning, the songs may not always sound exactly like the recording, but the goal is to learn the mechanics, have fun, and, you know, start hitting those goals. But you have to write them down, and they have to be very, very specific. And finally, having a support group is super amazing. Whether it's a local group that you go to with people who are also learning guitar. This could be a Facebook group. It could be an online community like My Fellowship of the Strings, or it could be a guitar for. You know, there's many guitar forms. There's a lot of mean people out there, and I've seen this a lot. But mainly on, like, stuff like ultimate guitar. There's people. They're like keyboard warriors. They're very, very mean to new players. And, you know, it's because there's A lot of people who, you know, they play guitar and they're very technically good at playing guitar, but they're not very good at teaching beginners or motivating beginners or encouraging them along the way. And especially when you're learning the guitar, a lot of times you know you're making mistakes. These strings, oh, they're muted when you're playing the chords. And it can be very lonely. You think in your mind, I must be the only person that's having trouble with the D chord. I must be the only person in the world that's having trouble with my C chord or my strumming or my timing. And then you go into a community of like minded beginners and you find out that you're not the only one, that someone that you see who's been playing guitar for a year, who's absolutely amazing, at least in your eyes, they don't think they're that good. But you're like, wow, I wish I could play guitar the way you do. They were in the exact same position you were a year ago, three months ago, six months ago. It's the same path for everyone, even me. When I was learning my chords, they sounded like that. Okay, they sounded like crap. And obviously I've been playing guitar for a very long time now. They sound much better, thank God. But it happens with time. Okay, so a lot of students, they get frustrated in the beginning and that's what causes you to give up so quickly, because you think I'm not talented enough. I waited too long. Like I said, a lot of my students are in their 50s, 60s, 70s. I even had a student yesterday in the community. He said, I'm 85 years old and I'm finally achieving my dream of playing guitar. So never too late to learn guitar. I've taught people all the way into their 90s, even. So, where there's a will, there's a way. And if you want to do this, it's totally possible. But you do need to get serious about learning. You need to get organized about your practice and you do need a structure to learn from. YouTube is great, but if you're learning from bits and pieces here and there, eventually you're going to get overwhelmed, you're going to get frustrated, and you're going to want to put the guitar back in the closet in the garage, down in the basement where it's going to gather dust. So if you are ready to get serious about playing your guitar and you're looking for an amazing blueprint, I would highly recommend go checking out my seven level guitar system where I teach you the three fundamentals for having fun learning guitar without all the music theory mumbo jumbo, that's confusing. And we just focus on the mechanics of having fun. It goes a little bit slower. I have a lot of students who come to me and they say, I did this other online course and they just went from zero to 60 too fast. And that's why I say my course really is designed for older learners. We don't fly through everything. There's a lot of repetition. It's very methodical. It comes with a workbook, step by step, so that you know what to work on today, what to work on tomorrow, what to work on three months from now. Okay? So if you are interested in learning more about that, go down to the link in the description below, and I hope to see you in a lesson video real soon.