The guitar is a cool instrument to learn, and more people than ever are trying to master it now. People tend to think that learning the guitar will be easy though, they see it only has 6 strings compared to the 70+ keys on a piano, and they assume they can master it quickly – which is not the case at all.
The first step you need to take if you want to learn the guitar is either grab a course like the one mentioned in this Jamorama review or you need to find someone to give you lessons. Then you need to practice what you learn every day, as much as you can, to help build up the strength of your fingers and their dexterity, as well as allow you to move between chord shapes easily. Plus you need to learn all about the theory side of music, beats, measures, scales, modal harmonies, you can’t just strum those strings any old way and have it sound good!
I think it is the practice that really stops people in their tracks, at first it isn’t going to sound like anything as you’ll be buzzing the strings constantly as your fingers touch strings they aren’t supposed to, but then even as you get some chords going then you won’t be able to move between them quickly at all. Even just changing between chords is going to require hours of dedicated practice so you can actually do it fast enough to play a recognizable song, and it may takes months to do it for enough chords to play a small repertoire of songs.
So the moral of this article is that you shouldn’t believe people when they tell you how easy it is to learn the guitar, expect it to take months and be hard work and then you won’t get disheartened when you only make slow progress.