Don’t Buy a Guitar… Yet!
My apologies in advance to those who’ve just acquired or already own a guitar - hope is not lost on you, as you’ll see by reading on. Firstly, I LOVE guitars! I own many of them. I have small guitars and large guitars, acoustic and electric guitars. I have guitars with four strings, six strings, eight strings, and twelve strings. Why then, would I discourage anyone (especially potential guitar students) from getting one?
I say this because starting out on the right instrument may very well make the difference between a joyful, rewarding experience vs a discouraging one that ends in frustration. By adding a few important stepping stones on the path to playing guitar, you can radically enhance your musical results!
New students of the guitar (and other stringed instruments) must hear themselves playing music on their instrument as quickly as possible. This is especially true for adult learners, many of whom will give up due to discouragement before they reveal their potential and power as a musical being.
The approach I use with my students is to offer a series of important “wins” that allows them to play music and songs on day one. This provides the powerful motivation that supports them as they progress as a stringed-instrument player.
My approach starts students on a four-stringed instrument called the baritone ukulele, in an alternate “open tuning” of sorts. Some of the many benefits of this approach includes the simplicity of learning on four strings before moving to the six strings of a standard guitar. The size of the baritone ukulele is also more manageable - it’s the largest of all the ukuleles yet smaller than a regular guitar. It also has nylon strings that are easy and soft on the fingers compared to the steel strings found on most guitars. Finally, and most importantly, the special tuning I start with, allows for simple one and two finger chord forms that sound amazingly rich! This simplicity of the chording hand allows us to focus attention on our strumming hand in order to build the solid rhythm skills needed to sound great.
In addition to being quite affordable, the baritone uke has the additional and important benefit of being able to be tuned like the bottom four strings of a guitar (unlike soprano, concert, and tenor ukuleles). This means that we can also learn the standard chord forms that are completely transferable to the six-string guitar!
I hope this information is helpful for you in thinking about how you can start playing a stringed instrument. This approach can also be a great starting point on your way to other instruments such as the mandolin or the tenor guitar.
Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments!