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It's not only true that learning guitar should be fun, but even more true that if it is not fun then there are going to be an awful lot of people out there that can almost play a guitar, but gave up because they weren't having fun!

Few people decide to learn guitar because they have decided to become the next Hendrix or Clapton. They decide to learn because they want to have fun and want to be able to play the instrument. They also want to learn how to express themselves through music and might not even have a specific style in mind yet. Most will likely want to play heavy metal, rock or blues; but if they have fun while learning, they might also decide to try out one or two other less popular styles such as Hawaiian slack string.

There is one thing that you must keep in mind though: learning guitar is not easy, and even if it is made a bit more fun it still requires hard work. The question is how much hard work? The answer to that lies in how good you want to be. If you just want to get some fun out of playing the guitar for yourself and perhaps impress a few friends and relatives with your new-found skills, then not too much.

If, however, you have aspirations of becoming a serious player, then you will have some work to get through--both study and tons of practice. I am not talking the next Hendrix or Clapton here, but just a good band player, capable of playing a few riffs and covers. These players spent countless years practicing; and even Hendrix, although he learned on a one-string ukulele, got through a lot of hard work. If you are to be a good itinerant band player, doing college and town gigs on Friday and Saturday nights, you will have to learn how to play a wide range of music. That means practice.

Take blues, for example. Once you have learned the basics of blues you must also have a good understanding of what your guitar can do and then make it do it. Blues is no different from classical or heavy metal in the need to know your instrument and being able to play scales effortlessly. The blues scale is a simple pentatonic scale with a diminished fifth - or perhaps more rarely a diminished third or seventh. If you don't have a clue what I am talking about, then you are not ready for blues yet.

You need some basic instruction in scales and the meaning of "Blues." Even the heaviest of the metals learned their pentatonic scales, because without them these rapid riffs would be next to impossible. Get your scales off effortlessly and you can play anything that metal, rock or blues can throw at you. Learning classical guitar is different and requires a more academic knowledge of the theory of music; but even there, if you follow some simple rules, you can be very good just by learning your scales up and down the fretboard.

It is not only scales that you must learn, but also chords, irrespective of the style you want to play. A chord is nothing more than a number of notes played at once; and just like scales, you can play a riff by picking the individual notes that make up a sequence of chords. Talking right-handed here, when you see a player performing a fast riff, forget his picking hand: check his left hand and how he is fingering chords and scales, rather than his fingers flying all over the place.

This is what you should learn when learning guitar, and you should learn it easily by means of videos demonstrating your fingering, and how to use pentatonic scales and the appropriate chords when necessary. That can only be done by means of video since, although books are OK and are what our fathers had to use, today's guitar tuition has progressed and audiovisual methods should be the way to go if you want to be taught properly and in the minimum of time.

So how do you find such sites if your heart is set on learning guitar properly? There are several online, but since fun should also be a factor, you need to find a site that can offer you tuition in a number of different styles of guitar playing, and that also allows you to check out any style you want. You should be able to determine your own learning rate, access lessons when you want to and also get lessons on two or three different styles at once should you wish to.

Not only does that prove to you that such sites recognize you as being the customer, but also that they have the ability to teach any of the common and not so common guitar styles to anybody that requests it. Such online guitar teaching services know that learning guitar should be fun, and they do their level best to ensure that it is.

Keywords: online guitar teaching, learning guitar, learning guitar should be fun, play a guitar, learn guitar

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Andre Sanchez,