Published on March 22nd, 2018 | by Sunit Nandi

10 Most Common Beginner Guitarist Mistakes You Shouldn’t Be Making

Playing the guitar is just like any other form of art, you will have to deal with some obstacles along the way. This, however, shouldn’t be a reason to get discouraged. If playing the guitar is your passion, and you have the will to push on to improve your skills to a professional level. In fact, the best way to go about such obstacles is to identify them and make them your strength.

It’s obvious that some of the mistakes made by beginner guitar players can be hard to identify until they develop into habits. It might be too late to realize that you had gone too long with them. Fortunately, there still is a better way to prevent it by learning from the others’ mistakes.

Check these top 10 most common mistakes below:

1. Wrong Positioning Of The Left-Hand Thumb

When placing your left-hand thumb on the guitar, you want to avoid placing it in any other way and ensure that it’s placed on the middle of the guitar’s neck and points upwards. Most new guitar players will hold the neck, as if they are trying to create a loop around it with their fingers.

Always ensure that you use the first method as you hold the guitar, and don’t try any other method, to avoid messing things up. The truth of this technique, however, is that you might take some time to get used to. But once you make it a habit, it will feel easier as time goes by.

2. Ignoring The Guitar Strap

The straps going with beginner guitars seem like an unnecessary feature. And most beginning players want to play their guitars without it. One thing you need to know about the guitar strap is that it plays a major role in ensuring that your guitar is in position every time you play. It means that the neck points up, and not down and that the guitar’s body is positioned against yours. That way, you’ll be in a better position to play the guitar. In addition, always tightened up the strap so that it won’t keep falling off your shoulders.

3. Wishing To Play Too Fast Too Soon

We all have some expectations as we learn to do something. Some beginner electric guitar players expect to gain speed while playing, as soon as they have gone through a number of lessons. One thing you need to know about guitars is that speed will come naturally, with practice. The most important thing in learning guitar is knowing how to control your fingers, which means the movements you make are perfect. Such things can only be learned at lower speeds. Once you get used, your speed will also improve, without even having to try.

4. Not Practicing Enough

Are you practicing enough to master your skills? If you aren’t, no matter how fast you are at learning, you still will feel like you aren’t acquiring guitar playing skills as fast as you would have wished to.

There’s no magic bullet as far as learning guitar is concerned. You have to sacrifice at least some minutes, if not hours each day so that you can learn something new. Besides that, you should practice on what you learned previously, to get used. With time, your skills will grow, and so will your interest.

5. Failing To Play In The Presence Of Others

Naturally, as a new guitarist, you might not have enough confidence to play in front of others. Actually it is very important, since it helps you gain confidence with time, and allows you to identify some of common mistakes you might be doing.

Of course, you won’t have to play at gigs as you begin, or maybe as an intermediate guitarist. As if someone loses interest in you, they might make you feel discouraged to practice harder. The best way to go about it is to start with your family, then move on to friends. Once you start getting some compliments and smiles, you’ll feel more confident to practice harder for better results.

6. Practicing With An Out-Of-Tune Guitar

As a newbie, you might not know how to tune a guitar properly, and even worse, you might not know when the guitar needs to be tuned. As such, most beginners end up playing the guitar while it’s out of tune, and that means that if they continue to practice time and again while it’s out of tune, they’ll just be perfecting on a mistake.

You don’t want to do that since once you realize that you have been making a mistake all along, you’ll have to start over. As such, you need to buy a tuner, go through some tutorials, and once you learn how the tuning should be done, you can tune your guitar, for better results.

7. Failure To Hold The Pick In The Right Way

You may have heard that holding the pick is somehow a personal decision since it depends on what works out for you. Even though that seems true most of the times, there still is a “right” way to hold the pick. The best way to do that is using your thumb and index finger, and not like most beginners do. This way, you can reduce your learning curve significantly. To see how experts use their finger positioning, you can take online guitar lessons at Take Lessons to improve your abilities.

8. Practicing Without A Metronome

You never want to practice without a metronome since it’s one of the most crucial tools that help you more advanced. With it, you can slow down as you practice, so that you’ll acquire a natural sense of rhythm as you continue learning how to play. Remember, it all about keeping your music composed, and not just learning how to play fast while sacrificing composure.

9. Learning From Too Many Sources

The world has gone digital in such a very short time, and that means that there are lots and lots of guitar lessons online. A comparison of them are listed on TrustyGuitar. That can be proved by the fact that there are almost endless results on you tube when you search for tutorials on how to learn to play the guitar. That’s where most beginners go wrong since they’ll want to jump from one video to another, read an article after another, and keep on switching courses now and then.

This especially happens when they realize that they’ve gotten stuck on something, so that they end up confused, hence learning almost nothing because of too many sources. If you find something difficult to understand as you learn, you should actually embrace it. It will help you to acquire new, unique skills that you might not have learned anywhere else. By sticking to one source, you’ll learn faster, and better master the skills.

10. Practicing On Boring Drills Rather Than Songs

Do you know which is the worst motivation killer? Repetitive non-stop drills are the worst exercises you can take when trying to learn how to play the guitar. You don’t want to try one thing over and over, despite the fact that it’s boring.

Do you want to feel more interested in playing the guitar every time you’re learning? Then go for songs, since there are many famous songs that are considerably easy to play. This way, you’ll want to practice more and more and make your interest move up. With that, you’ll grow your skills to be a better guitar player day by day.

Wrapping Up

The above-listed points are the most common mistakes you can make as a beginning guitar player. If you’re already making such mistakes as you practice, you want to resolve these issues fast, to improve your guitar learning for better results. By avoiding such mistakes, you can prevent them from growing into habits, hence make your learning more efficient and easier.

Tags: beginner, guitar, guitarist, mistakes, most common, music, musical instrument

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.