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The best place to find tips for learning guitar effectively is online. Most people these days buy a guitar, play around with it for a while and find they quite like it, so look around for some serious lessons so that they can play properly. That's where many go wrong. Although there are lots of free lessons to be found online, you have to go about it the right way or you will never be as good as you could have been.

Here are eight tips that will help you to make the most of your guitar and become the best player you could possibly be. Many say that guitar playing is a gift and great players are born great, but nothing can do more for your ability than practice.

1. First and foremost, get to know your instrument. Find out how each part works, such as what the resonator and sounding board does, why an acoustic guitar has a hole in it and an electric guitar is solid. Find out how to tension the strings properly and tune the guitar correctly. In fact, a good tip is purchase a set of pitch pipes to tune your guitar with, and learn how to tune one string and then the rest of them from that. That will teach you a lot about how each string relates to the other.

2. Reading music. Some guitarists feel that they must learn how to read music, but it's not essential. Many of the world's greatest guitarists never learned how to read music, which is one reason that tablature, or tab, was devised. This shows you what fret and string you should be on, and what string to pick. Learn tab and you should be all set to learn any guitar piece.

3. Learn a few of the major chords. You will find a whole load of free guitar chord learning books online, but if you want to learn quickly then buy a book that comes with a DVD or CD that lets you hear what the chord should sound like. In fact, these books will let you hear what each whole lesson should sound like and even give you pieces to play along to. Don't just learn how to play the chords at the top of the neck, but learn all of their positions. There are ten different ways to play some chords all over the fret, so learn them all, and this will also teach you a lot about how the various strings and fret positions relate to one another. Once you know the majors, start on the others.

4. When learning chords it is important to practice a lot. Set aside an hour a day for chord practice, and play along to some tunes. Try singing as you play and have fun while doing it. Through time your fingers will develop a chord memory, and you will be playing them without thinking. If you have a buddy that is also learning, get together once a week or so and jam together. Make it fun.

5. Speaking of memory, your fingers and hands will also develop a muscle memory through practice, and it is always a good idea to strengthen up your hand and finger muscles. A grip strengthener is a good idea, and don't get worried if your fingertips start to hurt. That's normal when you start learning guitar. In fact, no list of tips for learning guitar would be complete without some advice on this. Good guitar players have a lump of callus on each of their fingertips, and until you develop that you will feel pain while playing, but you have to play through it until your calluses develop. You can help it along with some rubbing alcohol.

6. Don't give up. You are going to find some finger positions difficult and painful, but don't give up. Keep at it and eventually it will become second nature. The same is true of some barre chords - these can be the most difficult to play, but keep practicing. Do you think Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton gave up when trying to perfect these fantastic riffs and finger licks? Of course not, so don't you. However, the more groundwork you have done in learning what your guitar is, and how the strings and frets work, the easier you will find the flamboyant stuff.

7. This is not an essential tip, but try more than one style of guitar. Try playing bass, electric or Spanish, and you will find that the more you learn with these, the better you will play guitar in general. Learning guitar is more than just knowing how to play YOUR guitar, but about how to play ANY guitar. Try rhythm and lead, and learn how to play both chords and riffs. Who knows, you might find that you are suited to an entirely different way of playing than you have been practicing, but you will never find out if you don't try it.

8. The final tip is practice. Practice, practice and then practice some more. A great deal of what you see the great guitar players do is born from practice and is played using finger and muscle memory. They are not concentrating on what they are doing next; they simply relax and the result of their hours of practice flows out of their hands into the strings. You will be no different.

These are eight good tips for learning guitar effectively; and if you follow every one of them, there is no reason on earth why you should not be a great player. Perhaps it is true that great guitar players are born, but it is also true that every one of them practiced every spare minute they had.

Keywords: learn guitar

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Andre Sanchez,