How To Play Home Again On Guitar

At What Age Should You Learn to Play Guitar?

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Guitar legends make it look so easy but talent, skill, and perseverance are needed if you want to learn the guitar. When you first pick up a guitar you won't even know how to hold the plectrum or how hard to press on the fretboard, but after a few lessons, you'll understand enough to play some basic chords. As with everything, practice makes perfect so you'll need to play as much as possible if you want to play for even the smallest audience. When you consider how much is required to go from zero to guitar hero, you might wish you'd started at an earlier age but at what age should you begin to learn the guitar?

Love of Music

There's no definite age at which you should start learning the guitar. Ed Sheeran, for example, played his first gig when he was 11 years old. The British singer performed Layla for a school concert. He's never revealed at what age he first picked up a guitar but he started singing in public from the age of four when he joined the church choir. As with Sheeran, a love of music has to be at your core before you pick up a guitar because this is not an easy instrument to master.

When Should You Learn?

The sooner you start to learn, the easier it will be to grasp but most kids need to be school age before they learn music. Children learn a lot in school but what helps them learn music is that they become used to adult-directed learning through school. They'll also be used to practicing things over and over, and school also teaches a level of discipline needed to master a musical instrument. For this reason, children should be at least six years old before they turn to formal music lessons but parents can still encourage their kids to learn and love music.

Encouraging a Child's Love of Music

Taking children to concerts is one way of encouraging their love of music. This will allow them to appreciate the art of making music and they'll experience the sensations only live music can give them. The acoustics in a venue and the atmosphere created by the crowd will help spur on their love of song. Sharing music you personally love will help nurture the same feeling in your child. If your child is a preschooler, you can encourage them to become involved in music through singing. This will help them to understand rhythm and it has the added bonus of helping to develop their language skills.

First Lessons

When your child is ready to play guitar get them some lessons from a professional. The first lessons typical include basic introductory skills like how to hold the instrument and an understanding of how the guitar works. For example, unless you play the guitar you won't realize that you don't need to press the string down all the way to the wood on the neck. You only need to press it against the fret in front of your finger in order to play the chord you're attempting.

Teaching Yourself to Play

If you decide to forgo formal lessons and instead teach yourself to play the guitar, you'll need to use a combination of reference books and online videos to get the most out of your time. Even then, you'll really need to play for someone who knows what to listen and look out for in order to master the guitar. As with anything you're trying to learn, practice and you'll improve with time. But how much time is needed?

There's a school of thought that 10,000 hours are needed to master any activity. That's something that writer Malcolm Gladwell brought to the mainstream in his book Outliers. He wasn't specifically talking about learning an instrument but it's a useful guide to the amount of time needed to master a musical instrument.