How To Play Acoustic Guitar

Home » Guitar Playing Tips » How To Play Acoustic Guitar

By: Mike Hammil

Feeling sick of your gaming console? Bored of watching television? Had enough of reading books and scribbling in your notebook? If you have a soft corner for music & are tired of the same old things that one can do in their free time, here’s something fresh to try! Learn how to play an acoustic guitar! Once you begin, you will realize it’s not as tough as it seems!

To begin with, one has to understand the concept of ‘guitar chords’ & ‘strumming’. In a layman’s language, a chord is a pattern that you hold with your fingers on the guitar’s fret-board while your other hand ‘strums’ the strings in a particular rhythm. The many guitar chords can be easily understood by reading chord diagrams that are intensively available in any guitar web site or book. Once you know how to read these diagrams, most of your job is done! What remains now is to hold the patterns correctly with your left hand. An important thing to remember while holding the chords is that your fingers, which are supposed to hold the strings, are pressed firmly over them. You can then play each string individually to see if they are sounding clear. If you fail to hold the strings tight, a dull & muted sound is heard. This mostly happens if you aren’t holding the strings tight enough or if some of your left hand fingers are touching some string that is not included in the chord pattern.

The next step is to ‘strum’ the guitar strings. Strumming must be done mainly using your wrists. What most beginners tend to do is that they strum using their entire forearm up till their elbows. This is a common mistake one may be making & should be dealt with, in the early stages of learning how to play an acoustic guitar. While strumming, you should try to make a smooth stroke always, striking all the strings (the ones which you are holding with your left hand) together so as to get a ‘composite’ sound. What makes chord sounds beautiful aren’t the individual strings but the sound, which they make together! A useful tip to be kept in mind is to ‘mute’ the strings which don’t appear in the particular chord pattern. Muting involves resting your left thumb (or maybe any unused finger), lightly, on the strings that aren’t in the chord that you are playing. Muting greatly increases the clarity of the sound your guitar makes, so if you really are a perfectionist, make sure you use it!

You could start with the simple ‘G’ or ‘A’ chords and go on to playing more complicated ones like ‘C’, ‘D’, ’E’, etc. After you have mastered these basic chords, you can try more difficult ones, arrange them in melodious patterns and sing along too! Learning how to play an acoustic guitar will surely help you chase away boredom and develop a skill that’s sure to impress peers. Who doesn’t want to hear a few claps now and then, huh? So don’t wait, grab your acoustic and strum away to sheer happiness!