Learning to Play Guitar

Learning to play guitar is often a frustrating experience for many people, because they find that learning how to play musical instrument on their own using textbooks and exercise books is a much more difficult process than expected.  In fact, in a recent survey 95% of self-taught musicians said that it was much harder than they thought it would be.

To make it easier, the number of Internet-based courses have been developed to that used in full features of your computer to make it easier to learn how to play the guitar.  They take advantage of the multimedia facilities of your computer.  Now while multimedia is a word that has been bandied around to mean different things by different people, so what I mean by multimedia is simply mixing together video, audio, text and interactive software to produce a complete learning experience.

To see why this is worthwhile consider how much easier it is to understand a video showing you how to play chords compared to a diagram showing finger positions.  In the video, they could see somebody else playing the guitar and see exactly how it's done. It is relatively easy to copy what you see another person doing as long as it is done step by step.  With a diagram, you often find yourself struggling to understand how to apply what you've just seen.  So I'm sure you'll agree that video makes learning to play guitar a lot easier.

Interactive software makes it easier to develop your skills.  Instead of working by yourself from a book with no real way of gauging your development, you will be working with software that gradually improves your abilities and let you know how much you're improving.  This can be a huge boost to your morale.

For example, some courses include software that you prove your ability to read music quickly by quizzing you against a time limit on a gradually increasing difficulty level.  Because of the immediate feedback that you get when your using a software, it doesn't feel like a chore.  In fact it's more the challenge, making it similar to the video game.  This means that you're actually having fun while you're learning rather than just pushing yourself through a series of exercises.

There's also software that trains your ears so that you'll be up to recognize music and play it back even if you've only ever heard it once.

However, it's important not to lose touch of the human factor when you are learning, in other words the computer will never be up to answer any question for any difficulty that you may get into as you are learning.  The best course is that I've seen on the Internet provides personal tuition in addition to multimedia content, so that you can get your questions answered and all the advice you need to make it the best musician possible, and to make learning to play guitar fun rather than painful.

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