Did you know that Guitar in a Nutshell rated #1 for learning songs on guitar? Click Here To Watch Some Easy Song Guitar Lessons!
When you begin learning your first major and minor chords a great revelation happens, it’s the realization that there are lots and lots of easy songs to play on acoustic guitar using just a handful of those chords and 1 or 2 simple strumming patterns.
The best key in which to begin learning songs is in either C major or G major (click here if you don’t understand keys yet, it’s important). This is because both those keys utilize more open type guitar chords than any of the others. Open chords are the easiest for beginners to start learning and include ones like E minor, C major, G major, D major, A minor and so on.
As you travel deeper into the cycle of 5ths and different keys you’ll find that they gradually become more remote and include an ever increasing number of barre chords (Master them in 10 simple steps with this link!). Since barre chords represent a considerable challenge to most beginners, learning to play songs in the keys of C and G offer the best way forward for your first attempts.
If you find it too hard to sing and play guitar at the same time then revert to doing only a single strum on each chord while you sing the lyrics. What’s happening is you haven’t yet acquired enough skill on guitar yet to be able to play it automatically and too much of your mental energy is being channeled to the guitar side of things leaving not enough resources for the vocal/lyrical side – hope that makes sense!
Until your ability to strum and play chords becomes more natural and second nature you’ll continue to struggle to sing along with even the easiest of simple guitar songs.
Be patient with yourself during this important transition and avoid the temptation to rush ahead too quickly, it will only frustrate you and often leads to total failure.
Free Acoustic Guitar TABS and Sheet Music
We are very fortunate to have so many easy guitar tabs and song sheets available for free to download off the internet. Never before in the history of learning guitar has this been made so readily available and countless students have benefited greatly from these kinds of online resources.
Learning how to read guitar tab takes only a day or two and fluency will come within a month, that’s incredible when compared to the time it takes to achieve the same results with traditional music notation.
And let’s not forget about the best free source of guitar lessons on the web… YouTube (Check this channel out in particular!) This is quite simply the biggest free warehouse of guitar song tutorials you’ll find anywhere online and you can search through thousands of good acoustic songs picking and choosing new ones you wish to learn each day.
Guitar songs for beginners need not be limited to only pop music, many of you are more into easy country guitar songs and while the strumming patterns will be a little different there’s no reason why you can’t have a great time learning how to play guitar in this genre of music.
Try These Examples Of Beginner Guitar Songs
- A Horse With No Name – America
- Hotel California – The Eagles
- Knockin’ On Heavens Door – Bob Dylan guitar songs
- Take It Easy – The Eagles guitar songs
- Losing My Religion – REM
- Wonderful Tonight – Eric Clapton
- Let It Be – The Beatles
Learning to play a guitar is incredibly rewarding. Keep changing what you learn, keep trying new and different songs, learn different genres of music – it’s all part of having a healthy musical diet!
