How do I learn guitar as an adult beginner?

Most adults who give up guitar do so in the first month, for two predictable reasons: their fingertips hurt and their chord changes are too slow to play anything recognisable. Both resolve with a few weeks of short daily practice.

What you'll need

• A guitar that has been set up and is in tune
• A tuner or tuner app
• A capo (optional)
• A metronome app (optional)

Step by step

1. Get a guitar that plays easily.A badly set up guitar with high action makes chords painful and can be impossible for a beginner. A setup at a shop costs little and can transform a cheap instrument.
2. Tune it every single time.An untuned guitar sounds wrong however well you play, and it trains your ear incorrectly. A clip-on tuner or an app takes thirty seconds.
3. Start with four or five open chords.E minor, A minor, C, D and G cover an enormous number of songs. Learning these five well is worth far more than knowing twenty badly.
4. Practise the changes, not the chords.The chord shapes come quickly; moving between them is the actual skill. Set a timer and count how many times you can change between two chords in a minute, then try to beat it.
5. Play real songs immediately.Simple three-chord songs from the first week. Playing something recognisable is what keeps people practising, and exercises alone rarely do.
6. Expect sore fingertips.For about two weeks, until calluses form. It is normal and temporary. Short daily sessions build calluses better than occasional long ones, which just make you sore.
7. Press just behind the fret.Not on top of it and not in the middle of the gap. Just behind the fret needs the least pressure and gives the cleanest note — most buzzing is caused by finger position, not by pressing too softly.
8. Arch your fingers.Fingertips coming down vertically onto the strings, not flat. Flat fingers mute the adjacent strings, which is why a chord sounds dead or partly missing.
9. Practise fifteen minutes daily.Frequency builds physical skill far faster than duration. Fifteen minutes every day will beat two hours on a Sunday within a month.
10. Structure the session.Five minutes of chord changes, five minutes of a new thing, five minutes of playing something you enjoy. Undirected noodling feels like practice and produces very little improvement.
11. Use a capo to play along with recordings.It lets you play simple open chord shapes in the key of a song you like, which is far more motivating than transposing everything.
12. Get some feedback.A few lessons, an online course with structure, or a friend who plays. Self-taught players entrench specific errors that an outside ear catches in seconds.

Tips

• Practise the changes between chords, not the chords themselves.
• Fifteen minutes daily beats two hours at the weekend, by a wide margin.
• Sore fingertips last about two weeks. Push through that and it stops.

Common mistakes

• Practising chord shapes in isolation — Forming a chord is easy within a few days; the difficulty is moving between them in time. Practising changes against a timer targets the actual bottleneck.
• Playing on a badly set up guitar — High action makes fretting genuinely painful and chords impossible to hold cleanly, so beginners conclude they lack aptitude when the instrument is the problem.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask