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You should learn guitar if you have an interest in guitar. If you listen to music that uses guitar and you ever imagine yourself playing those songs, that’s a good sign you should learn to play guitar.

Being interested in guitar-based music is the strongest sign that you might enjoy learning guitar.

Here are some of the benefits of learning guitar:

• Improves coordination.

• Enhances concentration. 

• Keeps your mind sharp.

• It’s fun.

The reason so many people stick to learning and playing guitar for their entire lives (I’m one of those people) is because it is such a rewarding hobby.

While the benefits of learning guitar are really worth considering, there are some disadvantages to consider.

Here are the main disadvantages of learning and playing guitar:

• Everybody sucks in the beginning. 

• Growing pains.

• Time commitment.

• GAS. A lot of guitarists suffer from GAS: Gear Acquisition Syndrome. 

There are so many different guitars, pedals, amps, and gear you can buy as a guitarist.Most of the disadvantages of learning guitar come at the very beginning. It’s important to keep in mind that the growing pains and frustration you feel are temporary.

The more you practice and keep pushing yourself, the sooner these disadvantages disappear and you can start to really enjoy playing guitar.

Guitar is hard to learn in the beginning, but gets easier the longer you stick with it. The more you practice, the easier guitar will feel to play.

This is why most people who quit guitar do so in the very beginning. Learning guitar feels hard at first. so they mistakenly think that they’re not good enough to learn guitar. But if they were to keep practicing, they would have overcome this difficult stage.

The key to remember is that guitar is only hard in the beginning. The longer you stick with it and the more you practice, the easier it gets.

If you want to learn guitar, make the commitment to push past the difficult early stage. If you can get through the first six months’ worth of practice, you’ll notice it becomes easier.

Learning guitar is very good for your brain. Learning anything new helps your brain discover new ways of thinking. There are so many different skills and concepts to learn on guitar, so your brain has a lot of great opportunities to grow.

The good news is that all of these benefits from learning guitar carry over to other areas of your life. Learning guitar doesn’t just make you good at guitar, it helps you think clearer in other areas of your life.

A great example is when school children learn guitar. It is very common for school scores to rise in other areas such as Mathematics after learning guitar. 

Many studies have concluded that learning a musical instrument can have a significant positive impact on a child’s development. But similar benefits are available for teenagers, adults, or older people.

How long it takes to learn guitar depends on what you want to play. Learning simple strumming songs can take a few months, while learning complicated solos and riffs may take years.

The type of guitar you should learn on should match the type of music you want to play. If you want to play music meant for electric guitar, you should learn on an electric guitar. If you want to play music meant for acoustic guitar, you should learn on an acoustic guitar.

The advice that some guitar teachers give to start on one type of guitar because it’s easier on the fingers and move to your preferred type later on is terrible advice.

If you really want to rip into some heavy metal with a cranked amp, would you really want to start learning on a classical guitar that you can’t even plug into an amp? Of course not.

Yes, you can teach yourself guitar. There are many great online resources that will help you learn guitar on your own. While it may be harder to learn guitar without a guitar teacher to guide you, you can definitely teach yourself.

The reason playing guitar makes you smarter is thanks to what is known as brain plasticity. This study explains how learning a musical instrument positively impacts brain plasticity.

The plain English version is that when you learn guitar, your brain learns new ways of thinking about problems and identifying patterns. While these new ways of thinking were created by learning to play songs on guitar, they are useful in other areas of life.

This doesn’t mean that everybody you meet who plays a musical instrument will be super-smart, it does mean that learning to play an instrument can give your IQ a slight bump and help you with other areas of your life.

The first thing to learn when playing guitar is how to correctly hold the guitar and play single notes. Learning to play single notes correctly will set you up for all the other skills you might want to learn.

Learning to play a single note is a skill you should work on before you consider learning chords or riffs. You can’t play a chord until you can play one note, so when you first start learning guitar, focus on playing single notes as cleanly as possible.

The finger exercises in this lesson are a perfect starting point for anybody learning guitar.

Start with the easiest finger exercises and use them to practice playing single notes. Once you can play single notes with ease, you can move on to other skills such as chords.