Don't just practice one song at a time on your guitar.
Practice several songs! [Beginner Lesson]
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How many songs do you want to learn on your guitar? Just one? Probably not. Then why would you only practice one song at a time? Let's find out the answer...
Beginner Lesson
You have to start somewhere.
More than likely, as a beginner, you've probably been learning some of the most basic open-string chords on the guitar and slowly adding them to your chord vocabulary. What good are these chords if you don't play songs with them? Well, you can't really paint on a canvas without colors, right? Think of chords (and notes) as colors on your pallet. The guitar is the canvas and your pick is the paint brush.
Your guitar teacher has probably given you a group of chords that belong in a specific key. Guess what? Your teacher has a good reason for doing this. Songs use chords. Some songs have a lot of chords and some have only a few. Guess which songs you're going to start off learning. You and/or your teacher must create a list of about a hundred songs (to start). These songs are "beginner" guitar songs. This means that they are easy to practice and play for beginners.
What makes these songs so easy for beginners?
Chances are, many of these beginner songs will have many of the same chords in each song. Imagine practicing the same dozen or so chords in about two-dozen songs. Instead of just learning one song at a time, you should be practicing a lot of songs that have the same chords in them. Don't worry about learning a lot of chords before learning how to play songs on your guitar. There are literally thousands of easy, beginner guitar songs available.
How can you find these songs?
It's all about "keywords". Whichever search engine you use (i.e. Google, Yahoo, DickDuckGo, Bing, etc), you need the right keywords to find the right websites that have the right lists of songs. There are a lot of musicians in the world who have created their favorite lists of songs and put them on the internet. The idea is to find these lists of songs. I recommend the following keywords to do your search: "top 100 beginner guitar songs". You will immediately find website after website with lists of a lot of the same songs.
How do you know which songs to practice?
It is probably best if you choose songs you are actually familiar with. If you like country music, add "country" to your keyword search. Same goes with "rock", "blues" or "pop". I recommend adding the keyword "70's" to your search. There are so many amazing guitar songs that were written and recorded in the 1970's. Thousands of these songs have long since stood the test of time. I also highly recommend "The Beatles". So many of the Beatles songs are easy enough for any beginner to play. Pick a half-dozen Beatles songs and add them to your song repertoire.
The internet is filled with endless websites where you can look up chords for songs. I recommend Ultimate-Guitar.
You need to build your chord vocabulary and understand why chords work together. You also need to know how to practice changing your chords clearly in rhythm by using a metronome. Do this as much as you practice your guitar when you are learning songs. Learn how to recognize the names of chords and change them while using a metronome. Once you have a good amount of time investedin this, and you feel comfortable playing with your favorite songs, take each song one step at a time. Learn songs in sections and in parts. Don't worry about being able to play the entire song well. Think more like learning the structures of songs and how they are all quite similar to each other.
And another thing...
Since we all have smartphones, utilize the audio recording app on your phone to record yourself as you practice each song. You're just going to have to trust me on this. I know it works because that is what I did when I was a kid. We didn't have digital recording technology available in a pocket sized computer in the 1970's. I had tape recorders. Next to the guitar, my tape recorder was the second best tool for learning how to play songs. So, record yourself as much as you can. Listen to the way you play the songs. Listen for the strong and weak parts and where you need to improve. Remember, this all takes a long time. Frustration is expected, but don't give up or be deterred.
Don't practice until you get it right. Practice until you can't get it wrong.