Our latest YouTube installment shows instructor Steve Krenz playing along to musical notation for the song “Greensleeves”. If you are into your guitar training a bit, is this something you can play along with? Or is the way you’ve learned to play guitar leaving you without learning how to play along to music as well?

With the Learn and Master Guitar series, you learn to not only play chords and solos like you would expect to, but you learn to play them properly as they are written musically. Once you have learned how to properly read music and are moving along at a good pace playing with it, the sky’s the limit on what songs you can play!

Maybe people think that in order to play the guitar, they need hands and fingers big enough to play properly. This may discourage people from learning to play the guitar, but is it true? Check out this video of nine year old Yuto Miyazawa, who has some amazing guitar chops! Now if a nine year old with hands that small can shred Crazy Train like that, anyone can play the guitar. So if you've always wanted to learn guitar and thought your hands were too small, don't let it stop you.

So you just bought your first guitar and you are ready to start tearing it up. What’s the first step? For the majority of us, playing the guitar doesn’t just come naturally, so we must learn. Before you jump right in though, there are a few suggestions from Learn & Master Guitar that you may want to think about.

Some things we may not think about are things such as learning what the various parts of the guitar are called, how to properly hold a pick, the correct hand position of your left hand to ensure that you get full contact of your fingers on the strings, and doing hand exercises to make your hands strong enough for sustained guitar playing. If you have an established understanding of not only the guitar itself, but proper playing position, it will go a long way towards you learning the guitar quickly and efficiently.

Do you have any tips for those who are just starting on their journey of learning the guitar?

We all have it, that one guitar chord that we love above all. When you are first learning to play guitar, you learn the basics: C, D, G, A, E. From there you branch out into minors, barre chords, sevenths, and other “specialty” chords. But we all have that one chord that we love to play, a chord that your hand automatically gravitates to whenever we initially pick up a guitar to play.

What is that chord for you?

Just like there are different types of guitars, there are also different styles of play. While you may think that you've got an idea of a style you'd like to focus on before you even start learning, it is best to learn as many as possible and then use them all to draw on when you decide on a style you like best. When you learn to play guitar with the Learn and Master Guitar series, you'll learn a myriad of styles to help you decide which one you like best. You'll learn: -Acoustic guitar -Electric & rock guitar -Classical and fingerstyle guitar -Blues guitar -Jazz guitar -Country guitar and chicken picken' -R&B and funk guitar With all of these styles under your belt, you can take little pieces of each and merge them into your own style of playing. Maybe you want to play country with a little blues flare? No problem. With the course, you'll get all of the tools you need to become the best player you can be, no matter the style.