TOP 7 Tips EVERY Beginner Guitarist Should Know

So if you're a beginner learning to play guitar here on YouTube, I want to share seven things that I wish I knew when I had started learning guitar many years ago, just like you guys, I learned on my own. I'm mostly self taught. And, you know, there's certain things that you don't realize until later in the guitar journey are very important. So I want you guys to be aware of these things and be on the lookout for them as you're learning because I think it's going to help you, one, make faster progress on your guitar, but also two, it's going to help you have a lot more fun sooner. Let's get into my seven tips.

Now, before we jump in, I just want to say my name is Lauren Bateman, and I specialize in teaching beginner guitar students to fulfill their dream of having fun playing this instrument. And a lot of students tell me, Lauren, you just make the guitar make sense. And I can understand why that happens. You. You know, I went around and I looked at a lot of these, you know, top mistakes beginners make or top things that beginners should know. And I was watching some of the videos and I was like, I would never teach a beginner this. That's not a beginner technique. And I think a lot of really advanced guitar teachers out there really forget what it's like to break things down and start at square one, where it's really just hard to play a single note or even play a chord. So I'm going to show you seven tips that I think are really for beginners and will help you greatly on your guitar journey. So the first thing I tell students is timing. This is something that comes up time and time again with my students, and it's really focusing on locking in your rhythm and your strumming to a specific timing. Now, this is important, especially if you want to play along to a backing track of a song on YouTube or if you want to play with your friends. So how do we solve this problem? Now, I always recommend that you keep strumming simple in the beginning, but I also recommend that you get on a metronome as soon as possible. Now, all a metronome does is it's just a little timer that clicks.

Now, what I would have my students do is we would focus on playing a single chord to the metronome and finding our timing within the beats. And then we would start progressing our strumming. Let me show you. So I have this metronome clicking at 100 beats per minute. I'm going to take one of our easier chords, we're going to do an E minor chord. And I would just tell the student, listen to the click and count with me. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. Now what we're going to do is when we get to the number one, we're going to strum a chord every time. And that's just the foundation. Can you get your timing to fit the metronome? All right, so here it goes. It goes 1, 2, 3, 4. 1.

Now, once you get that down pat, the goal is to work your way up so that you're able to do four strums for every single click. 1, 2, 3, 4.

Now, I know this seems very, very simple and very, very basic, but locking in with that timing is so important. And then what I would have students do is what we'd start switching between chords. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four. 1, 2, 3, Four. Or 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4 dot and this is so key to building timing when you're an absolute beginner. I found a lot of beginners, they move on to up strums way too fast before they actually get the real foundation of just locking in on those down strums. Number two. I wish I had learned real beginner guitar chords. You start off and you're, you're learning bar chords and there's power chords and there's like a bunch of different chords. And after teaching for so many years, I work with a lot of older students. I have a lot of students that are ages 50, 60, 70, 80, and you know, in my seven level guitar system, I decided, you know, I'm going to take a step back and teach people some easier chords that I used to teach my students in person. And they're two fingered chords, all right. And they help you with learning to play the guitar and have fun playing songs faster. Why? Because it's so much easier to move one or two fingers than it is to move three or four fingers at a time. So many guitar students, they start their C chord with three fingers and they hate it because it's so hard. And then they go to switch to a G chord, another three finger chord, and it's so hard that it makes them want to throw the guitar down in frustration and give up. And I don't want that to happen to you. So I start my students with four very easy chords. They're the E minor chord, the easy C chord, the easy G chord, and then our easy D chord. So you notice that each of these Chords only requires two fingers. But there's also another benefit. They have pivot points, or at least the E minor does the E minor to C, you only have to move one finger. Okay. And it sounds fine. You're going, Lauren, that's a C chord. Yes. Actually is a C chord. You can play it that way to start. Okay. Just to get your fingers moving. In the beginning, we worry about learning the chords, but we don't focus on building the dexterity that's needed to actually play them well. All right? And then going from E minor to G, you just have to move your second finger. Okay. Second finger up and down. It's much easier than trying to remanipulate three fingers all at the same time. 1. Once your dexterity builds up, you can graduate to those full chords. But I have found time and time again that for my adult students, taking a week or two to start on these easier chords helps them have a lot more confidence in their playing ability and actually allows us to start playing real songs much sooner than we would if we started off with the three or four fingered chords. Number three, Repetition is key. Stop overwhelming yourself with learning too many things. And this is especially in regards to smoothing out chord changes. My students ask me all the time, Lauren, how do I smooth out my chord changes? My chord changes are really, really slow. And I have a couple little tips here that I'm going to go over. But the first thing I want to mention is one of my favorite quotes, which comes from Bruce Lee, and he says, I'm not scared of the man who has learned 10,000 kicks. I'm actually scared of the man who's learned one kick and practiced it 10,000 times. And it really brings home this concept of muscle memory. Now, for your cords to truly get fast and smooth them out, you have to stop building your chords. You know, one finger at a time. They have to move in unison. And that can take time. But we call that muscle memory. And you build muscle memory through repetition. So a couple tips here. One, stick to just learning four chords in the beginning. Everyone tries to learn, you know, every single chord under the sun. And I would recommend starting with E minor, C, D and G, because you can play thousands of songs with those first four chords. And remember, if you're. It's easier to memorize a 4 number password than it is a 12 number password. Okay? So it's going to be a lot easier for you to learn four chords and develop muscle memory for four chords than it is if you tried learning 10 or 20 all at the same time. So focus on four chords first. The next thing is going to be finger pushups. Okay? Use finger pushups. What do I mean by finger pushups? Let's take that E minor chord because it's one that many people know already. And what you're doing is you're putting the E minor chord on, on the fret board. You're not doing anything with your strumming hand. Okay. And all we're doing is we're lifting the fingers just a little bit, maybe like an eighth of an inch or a few millimeters, if you're in the metric system. Okay. And we're just tapping on the strings. We're not even pressing that hard. We're just lifting the fingers and tapping them down on the strings. All right? And then what you're going to do is maybe you're going to pull them, you know, an inch or maybe like 5 centimeters from the fretboard. Then you're going to fully extend your fingers, place that E minor chord on the fret board. After that, what are we going to do? We're going to lower our hand, bring it up, place it on the fretboard. Okay, so what are we doing? We're practicing just the motion of getting this chord in the right position. Now, for some of you, particularly if you're working on, you know, if you are someone who knows your full C chord or even our two finger C chord, what's going to happen is you're going to lift your fingers for a lot of you, and your, your fingers are going to flatten out. They're going to do this, okay? I can make chords in the air, I can make a C chord, I can make a G chord, I can make an A minor chord or D chord. I can form chords in the air because I have that muscle memory. A lot of you, you're going to take your hand off the guitar and this C chord is going to go like this, all right? Because your hands don't have the muscle memory yet. So that's why we just start very low. And if I go back to our two fingered one, we're just starting very simply, just barely lifting the fingers off the strings. And that's how we get the repetition in there. That's how we start building that muscle memory. And you'll notice has nothing to do with my strumming hand. So just because you're not strumming and fretting at the same time doesn't mean you're not learning. This is actually going to make you have a lot of progress in your chords and your chord changes. Number four, Lauren. How do I smooth out my strumming and. And my strumming hand? So this is something I wish I knew because for a lot of you, this is what happens when we start strumming or we start developing our strumming and we add in some up strums. Let's take a very great beginner strumming pattern, which is 1, 2, 3 and 4 and or down, down, down, up, down, up. Okay. Very, very great beginner strumming pattern. Starting to be a little bit more late beginner incorporating up strums. And what are we doing? This is what happens. We start playing a song and we go.

Okay, does this look familiar to anyone? You have to stop your strumming hand to wait for the chords to catch up. So I have two recommendations on this, something I wish I knew. One, the first is don't stop the strumming hand. Keep the strumming hand going and then form your chord around the strumming. Four, force this fretting hand to catch up. So like this, it would sound like this.

So you can see how I was building my chords while I was strumming. So the great thing about this is you never lose the timing so it still sounds musical as opposed to just completely stopping playing. The other option, if you don't like that, the other option is, and this is a little kind of top secret secret tip that a lot of people don't know, is that you can actually change the chord on the last up strum. It'll just give you a split extra second. This is for people who like, their chord changes are pretty fast, but they're not quite there yet. When you're doing that strum, 1, 2, 3 and 4. And then this. And I'm lifting up the fingers and I'm getting right to the next chord chord for one. So it's 1, 2, 3 and 4 and 1, 2, 3 and 4, and 1, 2, 3 and four and 1, 2, 3 and4. So you can see by switching on that up strum, it gives me a few extra seconds to get to the chord. Now eventually you'll probably be able to leave the chord down a little bit longer as you get faster. But this is a great little secret that a lot of students don't know. Something I wish I knew. I thought you had to like hold the chord all the way to the end. You don't. You can start lifting it up on that last up strum and start getting right to your next chord tip Number five. All right, answer this question for me. Right. Practice makes. Most of you probably said perfect. No, Practice makes progress. And this comes up in terms of speed. Sometimes to go faster, you have to sacrifice a little bit of perfection. This comes up a lot with chord changes. I have a lot of students who, you know, they're. They're doing great. Their chords are sounding good, but they're like, I've hit a plateau point. I've hit a plateau point, and I didn't learn this little trick until I've been playing guitar for, like, 15 years. And I wish I knew it as a beginner. And it was that if you want to get faster on the guitar, you actually have to push yourself out of your comfort zone. So most students, they're here, and they're like, my chords sound great, but I can't get them any faster, or they start sounding like this.

And that's great. I know you guys are like, that's not great, Lauren. They sound like crap. It's okay. Now, when you want to get faster on the guitar, you have to sacrifice clarity. All right? It's a little bit of a paradigm. Okay. Or a paradox. I don't know. An opposite thing is that if you want to go faster, you have to sacrifice clarity. And if you want perfection, you want precision, you have to slow down your and practice for precision. Now, eventually, should keep practicing these things. They're going to come together and balance each other out. But for students, we do something that's called chord changes, where you just sit with the metronome, and every time it clicks, you switch to a new chord. Now, a lot of my students kind of get stuck around, like, 60 beats per minute, and they're like, I can't get past this. I'm reaching this plateau point. And I'll say, well, just do me a favor. Push the metronome up to 70. And they're like, yeah, but this is what my chords sound like.

And I'm like, that's okay. That's actually good. And they're like, how is that good? It's good because you're forcing your fingers to get in the right spots. So as long as your fingers are hitting the right spots and landing on the right strings, that's great. Okay? And I think a lot of students. This holds back a lot of people because they think if it doesn't sound perfect, it's not helping them make progress. And when you're trying to get faster, unfortunately, you have to sacrifice some of that clarity in the chords and then slow it back down, come back down, maybe now to 65. And maybe it's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be a little bit faster, and it's going to feel a little bit more comfortable. And you keep doing that over and over. If you never push yourself out of your comfort zone, you're not going to make progress. You're going to plateau, and you're going to hit a point where you're like, forget it. I can't get any better. I'm going to give up. And don't give up. It's just that you really need to push yourself, and you need to get perfection out of your head. Number six, your guitar and the strings you use actually can make a huge difference in how easy it is to play your guitar. Now, when I first got started, I didn't know that there was a difference in guitars. My sister just bought me, you know, kind of a crummy guitar off of someone that was she was going to college with. And it was a cheap guitar. And unfortunately, cheap guitars aren't easy to play. They're actually harder to play. I always recommend that students, if you can go above $300, you're going to get a much better, especially in the acoustic guitar range. In acoustic guitar, you're going to get much easier to play guitar. But I understand that a lot of people are on a budget, so if you have an acoustic, there's something you can actually do to make it easier to play, and that's change your guitar strings. Now, I wish I had known this when I first got started because it was so hard to press down those damn strings. Because most guitars come with what we call light strings. Some of them even come with medium strings, and they're much thicker. And the thicker the string, the harder it is to press down the fretboard. Compare that to something like this. These are my D' Addario Phosphor Bronze 11s. So they're a little bit thinner than my light strings. Now, string companies also make strings that are called extra light strings. We call those tens in the guitar world, and they're very thin, and they make playing much easier. Now, the trade off is that your guitar is going to sound a little bit tinnier, but that's okay. As you get stronger, you can always upgrade back up to either the custom light, the 11s, or the light strings. This is something I wish I knew. I've told so many students they've gone from either light to custom light or light to extra light, and they said it made their guitar so much easier to play, they wish they had done it sooner. Number 7. Having a roadmap will help you make progress much faster. Even Dorothy needed a yellow brick road to get home. And as you can imagine, having a blueprint for where to go next can be life changing. I had a lot of students that were here learning from me on YouTube and they're like, you know what, Lauren? I finally went and checked out your seven level guitar system and it made all the difference in the world. Having that step by step program, the PDF workbook with all the exercises. I felt like I was left overwhelmed and I was more focused on what I needed to learn as a beginner. Now my course takes you from kind of level one, which is like think about white belt techniques in karate. And it brings you up to level seven, which is kind of late beginner to early intermediate. We go over chords, strumming, picking patterns, lots of different things, even basic finger picking. But it's all in a step by step process. So you never feel overwhelmed as you're learning. So if you're someone who feels like you need a lot more structure to your guitar practice and you're tired of just kind of like haphazardly learning here on YouTube, highly recommend that you click in the description below on my seven level guitar system. Go check that out. I would love to help you make your dream of playing the guitar come true.