What To Expect From Your First Guitar Lessons

Learning to play guitar is different for everybody. It involves combining a variety of motor skills, listening skills and plenty of concentration to produce what looks like effortless playing. You will already have learnt some of these skills, such as feeling the beat of a song or recognising a pitch, just through having listened to music throughout your life. The free trial guitar lesson is a way for me to establish which of these areas you are strongest in so that I know how to approach our future lessons together. In this lesson I will try out a series of exercises involving chords, rhythms, strumming patterns and single note progressions. Some of these you’ll find incredibly easy, some of them you won’t be able to do at all. This is nothing to worry about, it simply tells me which areas we’ll be focusing on in the coming weeks.

Many new students worry about preparing for this first lesson, especially those that can already play a little bit. They tend to think that their playing won't be good enough, or that they don't know enough about music. Try to remember that the whole reason you are coming to a guitar teacher in the first place is that you want to improve your playing. If there were no faults in there at all you wouldn't need me. My guitar lessons are designed to be a relaxed place where you can make mistakes and learn from them.

In the following two or three lessons we’ll embellish on the techniques we covered in the free lesson, learning new chords and even a couple of songs. You’ll start to understand the mechanics of what you need to do to achieve the sounds you want to hear, and your muscle memory will start to develop. At this point it’s a good idea to think about what you aim to achieve through guitar lessons. Whether it’s playing in front of huge crowds of people, or simply playing at home for your own entertainment we’ll work together to get you to your desired level as quickly as possible.

A good habit to get in to early on is to pursue your own learning in addition to what I give you in the lessons. Many of my most successful guitar students are the ones who hear a song or a technique they want to learn, get as far with it as they can and then bring it to me to help them improve upon it.

Martin Sean McConnell - 19/05/15