How to Play the Electric Guitar

If you’re reading this, you are definitely a guitar player or you want to learn how to play the guitar. That means you already know that guitar playing is one of the most entertaining hobbies. It is said that you take your first lesson without a teacher and it is within that lesson that you fall in love with the instrument.

How many of us didn’t go to a party and there was this one guy that played the guitar and we all thought “Man, I wish I could play guitar like that”? You’ll most probably start playing the guitar when you’re a teenager, but as you grow older, it turns into a passion and your goal changes: you’re no longer looking to entertain your friends, but instead you want to improve your skills, you want to play that one song that you always had trouble playing, and you want to feel the music that comes out of your hands.

However, playing guitar is not easy, especially if you want to be real good at it. If you’re already a guitar player you know that becoming proficient is no easy task. It takes a lot of practice, patience and passion to master the instrument. You can’t expect great progress over the day, it takes years to learn to play guitar professionally.

If you want to learn to play the guitar or have just started, the first thing you need is the basic equipment. There are two types of guitars: electric and acoustic. While playing an electric guitar is the ‘coolest’, we strongly recommend you start by learning to play on an acoustic guitar. Even if it is harder to learn, it is the acoustic guitar that will help you ‘feel’ the instrument, get used to the sound. After you learn to play an acoustic guitar, electric guitars will come natural. If, however, you start on an electric guitar, you’ll find that switching from electric to acoustic can be harder.

There are several styles of playing the guitar: folk, rock, classical, etc. Each of these styles has its own techniques and even its own guitar. You can indeed use a classical Spanish guitar to play rock, but we definitely don’t encourage you to do so. If you want to play classical music, you need a classical guitar, nylon strings, and the right technique to go with it. First of all, opposed to playing the electric guitar, where you can hang the guitar on your neck and play it however you feel comfortable, in order to play classical guitar, you need to hold it in the right position: your left leg raised on a footstool, your guitar help on your left leg held in place with your right hand.

Every style of guitar playing raises its challenges. It should not be misunderstood; playing classical guitar is not necessarily harder than playing electric guitar. Actually, such a categorization cannot be made. It takes a lot of practice to master any style and any guitar and it is probably impossible to become proficient in playing more than one guitar type as the techniques are very different.