Guitar for beginners

[Tom Duke]

Howdy y’all, so I just got gifted a nice acoustic guitar in great shape, music/guitar stand, books, picks, tuner gadget, etc

I want to learn but I wonder if anyone here has any advice or experience on learning guitar.

I would love to teach myself how to play Good Ol Boys or General Lee by Johnny Cash. Or Momma’s don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. 
 

Let me know y’all! 

[Skipper Duke]

On 9/23/2025 at 1:24 PM, Tom Duke said:

Howdy y’all, so I just got gifted a nice acoustic guitar in great shape, music/guitar stand, books, picks, tuner gadget, etc

I want to learn but I wonder if anyone here has any advice or experience on learning guitar.

I would love to teach myself how to play Good Ol Boys or General Lee by Johnny Cash. Or Momma’s don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. 
 

Let me know y’all! 

I'm outta reactions so here... ❤️ 

[RogerDuke]

I've never heard any of the regulars here ever mention playing the guitar. 

[Jim85IROC]

Some random advice:

1. Take lessons from a local instructor. Learning guitar is hard. Having an instructor vastly improves your chances of success.

2. When you're learning chords, just hold the chord while you're watching tv. Strum it a little bit during commercials. At first when you pull your hand away, you have to carefully reposition your fingers. After a while you'll notice that your hand will snap back to that spot. Once it does that, you'll start to be able to just grab that chord without positioning your fingers.

3. Once you can grab the chord reliably, start working on a 2nd chord. Once you can grab 2 reliably, start switching between them

4. When you're actually practicing instead of just holding chords while watching Dukes reruns, focus on having good timing. That's a critically important skill. Go as slow as you need to. Whether you use a metronome, a youtube drum track or play along with the song, timing is everything.   Even if you can only strum the chord once per beat, your timing is always your priority.

4a. Learn to tap your foot to the beat. Do it to every song on the radio when you're not practicing. Make it become 2nd nature, because you'll need it to keep good time, especially when you start getting to songs with stuff that's off the beat.

5. A bunch of old Waylon and Hag songs are only 2 chords. 

6. This probably should have gone near the top, but take your guitar to a competent tech or luthier for a setup. Make sure he knows that you're a beginner and he should be able to set up the guitar with lighter strings and lower action. This will make it easier to play.  Like I said above... learning is hard, and frankly, it's a lot harder when you start on acoustic.  It's bigger, it's farther from your body, it's harder to see what you're doing, the strings are thicker and they're farther from the frets.

 

Hope this helps.