1. Get a capo

A capo is a moveable clamp that can be placed across the fretboard of a guitar (or similar stringed instrument such as the bouzouki or mandolin) to raise the tuning of the instrument (from E standard to F standard if placed on the first fret in E standard tuning). 

Essentially, it shortens the length of the strings, sort of like a barre chord without having to use your pointer finger (or ), consider it a guitar trick. The main advantage of using this tool is that the guitarist using it can play songs in different keys while using the open string chord forms.

2. Split your practice into short sections

You have to create a routine of your practice sessions and split it into short sections. Before anything else, you should do a proper warm-up. This is quite important, as everyone, even professionals, do warm-ups before shows, there are no guitar tricks here, only routine.

You have to get that mentality of doing something regardless of how easy/hard it is. It is recommended that you do practice sessions of around 30 minutes a day to get noticeable results.

3. Regular practice beats long hours

Out of all the tips for beginner guitarists, this might be the most crucial. Rehearse often but little, as to get good at guitar. If you let the excitement get the best of you, you might rehearse a day for a couple of hours, and then the following days you won’t want to do anything. So how long to play guitar is recommended?

Try to lower your expectations and practice at least 5 days a week, 15 minutes every day in the beginning. This repetition will help you develop muscle memory and endurance. If you go all out and go for several hours, you will need a longer period of time to heal your fingers, and thus what you’ve learned will go to waste.

4. Take care of your guitar

Here’s an acoustic guitar tip you might not expect to make a big difference but it does, keep it clean. If you take good care of a guitar, it will take good care of you, just like a car.

A guitar needs to be cleaned from time to time, like once every six months or so, you need to use special wood oil to wash your strings and most importantly, the fretboard. You should also consider using a piece of cloth to wipe the strings after every session to prevent rust. 

5. Practice scales

A fundamental yet critical part of guitar playing is practicing the scales, regardless if you want to specialize in rhythm or solo parts, it will train both guitar skills. Without scales you can’t play chords, nor do solo parts. Playing the guitar involves synchronizing multiple fingers at once, and the best way to improve your technique is by starting small, practice scales, one finger at a time.

This way you will learn the correct positions, even at a subconscious level, and you will be able to know them by heart and perform chords faster, as well as solos, and all the fun things. The pentatonic scale is the best to start with when it comes to this type of training.

6. Know what to practice next

It doesn’t matter if you choose to learn guitar by yourself or with a teacher as long as you learn it systematically. If you want to become a virtuoso, you should take everything into consideration, and that might include buying a beginner guitar.

However, if you want to play a certain genre, then my best guitar advice is to pick the techniques and theory in a logical manner (i.e. for Metal you learn tremolo picking, palm muting, and tapping, for classical songs and jazz you learn fingerpicking, etc.)

7. Play slow

Every guitarist loves shredding, and it’s natural for beginners to try it out before they are ready, but here’s the thing, you can only master this technique, and speed in general, progressively. Start by playing slow, and gradually increase the tempo as you feel you are ready.

If you want to play the guitar faster, remember that you can’t master speed by playing fast from the start, as you won’t have endurance, and you will most likely won’t even hit the right strings.

8. Learn the CAGED system

Playing guitar better involves the learning of the CAGED System. It describes the layout of the fingerboard by using the 5 major chords (C, A, G, E, D) and using this “map” you can “unlock the fretboard”, the main idea being that all these chords have notes that are found everywhere on the board.

Let’s take the C chord for example: You have 3 notes, the C, the E, and the G and this is where music theory and fretboard knowledge can kick into high gear.

The C chord can have many “chord shapes”, but due to it being only 3 notes, you can play it with a low, open E, the C on the A string on the third fret, and the G on the 5^th fret of the D string or the C on the A string on the third fret, the e on the second fret of the D string and an open G string, etc.)

9. Practice the hard stuff

It’s easy to get stuck in the comfort zone and play the same songs you already know how to play, but this won’t get you far. We can’t evolve on anything if we don’t get out of our comfort zone, and this is probably the most noteworthy beginner guitar tips I have to give you.

You must keep your repertoire constantly updated, but if indeed it is too hard for you to let go of some songs you already mastered, try playing them in different styles, or tempo, but the main idea is the same, you need to evolve.

10. Record yourself playing

Playing on your own has its benefits, however, when you play in front of an audience, or when you are recording yourself, that’s a totally different level, and yes, both things are a couple of times harder. 

Recording yourself while you play is among the best tips for beginner guitar players one could ever give to an initiate.  It is a natural step and the last one before you should play in front of an audience.

This is the perfect way to keep track of your progress, analyze your techniques, if you are on the right tempo, hear your mistakes, study your finger positions, or you can submit it online for others to either cheer you up or give you some tips.

11. Focus on one element at a time

It’s easy to get yourself disillusioned and try multitasking randomly, but that won’t get you far, instead, try to focus on one element at a time. You need to become aware of how a technique works, analyze it, work it out, and move on, and this is how you play guitar better in the long run.

The sooner you get to understand these things, the better, don’t randomly play something, although that has its own benefits, you should first train your attention by being focused on one element at a time.

12. Learn to mute

When playing guitar, in any genre, you may have some pauses in the melody, which are called rests, or you may have some dynamics which call for a technique called muting.

In heavy metal, from Black Sabbath to Metallica to Rings of Saturn, all these guitarists use palm muting for some riffs

What is palm muting?

Palm muting offers a percussive, short burst of sound. It is produced by placing the fleshy part of your thumb near the bridge and pressing lightly against the strings. For example of palm muting/chugging, I recommend you watch the live video for She-Wolf from Megadeth, where all the riffs incorporate this technique.

What are rest beats?

Rest beats are a percussive fingerpicking technique, usually used in acoustic pop or in flamenco style guitar, where you usually hit the bass strings with the fleshy part of your thumb, much like the palm muting, but instead of placing it lightly, you hit the string in a sort of slapping motion.

13. Learn Barre chords

No matter what tips for learning guitar you adhere to, you have to learn barre chords.  Barre/bar chords are open-string chords moved up the fretboard. The technique for this is to imagine that your finger is a capo or a guitar nut that moves along the fretboard.

Let’s take an example of a song (Dani California by RHCP) which uses the same verse bar chords as Last Dance with Mary Jane by Tom Petty and these chords are: A minor barre( bar all notes on fret five from E to e and place two finger – annular and pinkie on fret 7 ) chord, G Major barre ( bar fret 3 and place on fret 5 the ring and pinkie) and D minor barre (bar on 5^th fret on A string and place ring and pinkie on fret 7 of the D and G strings) and repeat.

14. Understand basic music theory

Most tips to learn guitar involve the learning of music theory. Why is everyone afraid of theory? In my opinion, people are afraid of music theory because they realize that there is more to music than just hogging on the guitar and going insane.

Here are some of my tips for learning the basics of music theory:

• Use Pascal’s triangle to understand the duration of the notes
• Employ math to understand time signatures
• Think of the numbers in the time signature as 4/4 is 4 ¼ notes, 2/2 is 2 ½ notes, etc.

Knowing only the basics of music theory is quite enough to be able to play guitar, but there are some more intermediate and advanced techniques, especially in the notation of sheet music, that will help you unlock more of your guitar.

15. Do NOT quit

Now, these tips to learning guitar mean nothing if you quit. Most people will do this in their first week, and you know what happened to me when I first started? I did the same, and I regret it. As time went by, I thought to myself, If I would have practiced all these years, where would I be now?

And you know what? I finally decided to pick up the guitar again, stick to it, and now I can do something that I’ve always dreamed of, express myself, without depending on anyone, and you can do the same, just believe in yourself.

Absolutely everyone reaches that point where you think you can’t progress further, but that is exactly when you need to push things up. If you put the needed hours in it, it’s impossible not to progress. Out of all the guitar playing tips I have to give you is this, don’t quit, you will regret it more than once, and time passes by quickly, irreversibly.

1. Wash Your Hands Before A Practice Session

This is pretty straight forward. Your hands gather throughout the day a lot of unwanted elements such as dirt, grease, and dead skin cells. These elements will activate a faster corrosion rate on your guitar strings.

By consistently washing your hands, not only do you get rid of all of these unwanted corrosive agents, but you also help your strings decrease their corrosion rate.

I’d strongly recommend you wash your hands before and after every guitar session you have. It is especially more important to do this if you have sweaty or greasy hands.

2. Purchase The Proper Cleaning Products For Your Strings

Having a good combo of cleaning/lubricating products will not only extend your strings’ life but also smoothen out your playing and remove unwanted friction. There are numerous good products out there for your guitar, you can get a guitar cleaning oil from marvinempire.ng.

3. Purchase Top Quality Strings

high-quality strings, especially the ones with an added layer of coating, last much longer. They also retain a good tone for longer periods.

These are my top 3 brands for acoustic or electric guitar string sets: D’Addario, Fender and Yamaha. They are also quite durable, so you won’t have to constantly change them.

4. Keep Your Guitar In A Moisture-Free Space

Moisture is the most corrosive agent you can be in contact with that you have little control over. It’s not like you can decide to move to another country or place right away or just magically change the climate.

However, a couple of things you can do are storing your guitar in the driest place in your house or purchasing an air dehumidifier. Mind you; if you don’t live in a very humid place (like near the sea), this might not be your biggest problem. However, it never hurts to have a good dehumidifier at your place.

5. Always Clean Your Guitar After A Session

Out of all of the tips here, this is the most important and influential habit you can implement.

Regardless of how much you sweat, how greasy your hands usually are, and your overall hygiene, it’s a fact that you are most in contact with your guitar when playing (duh…).

Therefore, this is the time when your guitar strings are most prone to storing corrosive elements.

Suppose you make it a habit to always clean your strings, pickups, and all of the metal parts in your guitar. You can DRASTICALLY reduce all of the corrosion rates happening in your guitar and your strings.

1. Don’t Play With Sweaty Hands

Excess sweat and grease are two of the most common problems when it comes to strings rusting. The main reason is that both sweat and grease contain minerals such as sodium, calcium, magnesium, and potassium. When these minerals pair with the natural toxins your body secretes, corrosion takes place. Overall, moisture from liquids also plays an important role in string corrosion. Now, if you’re a sweaty person like me, your string set’s life will dramatically decrease, and you’ll have to change strings all the time.

2. Don’t Store Your Guitar In A Humid Space

As I mentioned before, humidity and moisture are also two of your guitar strings’ worst enemies. In fact, having your guitar strings be in constant contact with humidity exponentially increases the rate at which they rust. This happens when you combine oxygen, moisture, and electrons found on metal.

The humidity levels are related to the moisture in the area you live in, the materials used to build the space you’re in, or storing your guitar in a poorly ventilated area. That is the main reason why your guitar strings start to rust at a faster rate.

3. Don’t Buy Bad Quality Strings

Buying cheap strings can be very enticing, especially if you need to change them frequently. However, in the long run, there’s a big downside to having poor-quality strings.

Let’s talk about string material first. Your typical guitar string’s core is completely made of steel. Manufacturers then use different metal alloys for the winding of said string.

The most common material used in string winding is nickel-plated steel. This material is more susceptible to rust than other alloys such as pure nickel or zinc plated steel. However, cheaper guitar strings corrode faster, which, in turn, will force you to change them more often. You will end up spending more. Go for quality guitar strings.

4. Don’t keep Bad Hygiene

Apart from moisture and sweat, there are other corrosive agents we put on our strings. Dirt, dead skin cells, and grime are the most common elements we transfer from our hands to the guitar strings.

It only makes sense our hands will transfer a lot of dirt since it’s what we use most in our day-to-day. If we have poor hygiene habits, it is more than likely we will constantly transfer these agents to the guitar strings, which will create corrosion at faster rates.

When to Replace Guitar Strings

Regardless of how long a guitar string is “supposed” to last, sometimes it doesn’t make it that long for any number of reasons. Here are six signs it’s time to change the strings on your guitar.

1. A string is broken

We’ll start with a self-explanatory situation — if a string breaks, you need to replace it. Not only is it a lot harder to play the songs you want with only five working strings, but the loss of neck tension changes the tuning and intonation on the remaining strings.

2. Your strings have changed color

There’s no mistaking the shiny, beautiful look of brand-new guitar strings. Over time the oils from your skin will tarnish the strings, turning steel to a dull gray color and bronze acoustic strings to dark brown. Strings may also start looking splotchy since some sections are touched more than others. Discoloration and splotchiness are good early indicators of needing a string change.

3. The strings are falling out of tune easily

After the initial “break-in” period, strings will hold their tuning well for a while barring major changes in temperature or humidity, especially steel strings. If it circles back around to where your tuning changes significantly from session to session, even if you’ve kept the guitar in the same conditions, it’s time for a string swap.

4. The tone has gotten dull

Strings are their brightest and snappiest when new, mellowing out once they’re broken in. Some guitar strings hold brightness better than others, but when you play them too long, they’ll end up dull, flat and muted. If your guitar has a dull sound even after maxing out the treble knob, a string change is in order.

5. The strings feel different

Unless you play heavy-gauge strings, new guitar strings should be flexible and smooth. If they start feeling stiff, that means the metals are corroding. Also, grime can start to build up on the surface, making the strings rougher. Both are signs you should change the strings or at least keep a spare set handy.

6. You want to have a different sound

Different string gauges, materials and construction methods change how your guitar sounds and feels. If you’re not satisfied with the tone coming from your guitar (too bright, too dark, etc.), a new set of strings is a simple and inexpensive adjustment.