How to Teach Yourself Guitar

A non-comprehensive, highly specific guide

I, Emma Harner, hold steadfast to a few beliefs about the best way to learn guitar:

1. Curriculums are recipes for burnout

2. Learning via writing is essential

3. There’s nothing more eye-opening than a technique overhaul

4. Do the easy thing

5. Play passively

6. Creativity as a muscle

I hope to explore these points in a way that makes sense, using my own journey as an example. Suggesting that people learn like this might be blind faith that everyone’s brain works like mine. Even if this isn’t helpful for how you learn, it will serve as a look into my process! And hopefully there will be something to take away.

1. Curriculums are recipes for burnout

From the list, already you can probably glean that I spent the first couple years of learning guitar by myself. I would look up the occasional YouTube tutorial toward the beginning, but I found much more joy in just playing around with the guitar in alternate tunings that I would stumble on. Curriculums that set out the next set of things to learn for you take away your autonomy on the instrument. Even if those things would be helpful to learn (and they likely would), I am always in favor of learning whatever it is you want to play. Motivation increases tenfold when you’re doing something you chose for yourself and really want to finish because then you’ll be able to play one of your favorite songs.

As a kid, I took piano lessons from 3 or 4 different people. I was never great at the piano and would always dread practicing it. I really began to hit my stride on the instrument, though, when I started taking lessons from this guy who would ask what I wanted to learn. I could bring in absolutely any song I wanted and we would figure out the chords or find the sheet music and learn it. One of the things I did over lockdown was learn (via Zoom lessons) how to play Claire De Lune. Considering the level I was at, I learned it over the span of many months, focusing on a couple measures at a time. Had this been a piece I didn’t want to learn, I never would have practiced it and I would have gotten nowhere, but since I loved the piece of music so much, and really, truly wanted to feel what it felt like to play it, I practiced for hours a day and conquered the beast. If it wasn’t lockdown I wouldn’t have been able to dedicate the time to it, obviously, so this is an extreme example, but the same applied to guitar when I started to pick it up. If I was following my instincts, playing what I wanted, I progressed quickly.

2. Learning via writing is essential

Okay, maybe it’s not essential for everyone, as I know many excellent guitar players who don’t make writing a part of their routine. However, for me at least, it was the only thing I wanted to do when I first sat down. You can’t be playing a song wrong if it’s YOUR song. Nobody can tell you anything about it. It was through writing that guitar, for me, became a textural thing. How do the strings feel under my fingers? What do I think sounds the most delicious? When you’re learning somebody else’s songs, it’s harder to notice these kinds of things as you focus on something not optimized for your own brain and fingers.

I have gained a great deal from learning other people’s songs and guitar parts, don’t get me wrong, but I think writing is an essential part of the process to see how you connect with the instrument. It’s how I learned that I love open strings so much.

I write songs slowly, as well, maybe writing one section of a song when I feel like it. Any time that I’ve rushed myself to finish a song, I’ve always ended up replacing the rushed sections. Some days it turns into something useable, and some days it doesn’t, but it’s always worth my time to sit down and slide my fingers around the fretboard until I’ve come up with something interesting or pleasant. Sometimes a phrase just feels nice to play over and over again as lyrics start to form. When you write, even if it’s something you don’t end up turning into a song, you start to use the guitar as a medium through which to express your own thoughts and ideas. This really helped me to become confident navigating the instrument even though I couldn’t play “Sweet Child of Mine” until years later.

A side note: I had to learn the “Sweet Child” riff in my first ensemble class at Berklee College of Music. It actually took me a while to get and I was met with a bit of, “How do you not know how to play that?”. The sentiment resurged as I met professors who were flabbergasted at my inability to RIP a solo over the blues or sweep pick the pentatonic scale in all its inversions. This is another strike, for me, against a rigid guitar curriculum. I prefer letting the wind take me. Maybe I’m just bitter, though, I don’t know.

3. There’s nothing more eye-opening than a technique overhaul

About 2 full years into my journey with guitar, I had my first guitar lesson at Berklee. I couldn’t have been paired with a better teacher. Abby Aronson-Zocher is a guitar genius. She studied classical and jazz guitar before joining the Berklee faculty. She taught Adrianne Lenker as well, which is just another line on the long list of incredible things she’s done. Abby made me feel comfortable immediately. She’s one of the kindest people I have ever met. Also immediately, she was able to tell me what I already knew but hadn’t been hearing- that I needed a classical guitar. I learned on one at home but left it behind because it belongs to my dad. My telecaster-style guitar was the instrument I brought to our first lesson, and as I began to play, she knew immediately that I needed to head to the guitar store and get a nylon string of my own. So I did.

It doesn’t matter what style of guitar playing you gravitate toward or are interested in. Having someone who really knows their stuff give you technique critiques- not notes to play, not theory to learn, but hand placement, the lightness of touch, phrasing, right hand technique- can take you from good to great. It was important that I already had that foundation of my own musical style when I met Abby, so she was able to see exactly what I needed to learn. Studying classical guitar both by learning the repertoire and by applying that technique to my own compositions completely changed the way I play. All of a sudden, I became so efficient. There’s no other way to describe it. My right hand was just flying all over the place. The rate at which I could write something and be happy with how it sounded increased dramatically.

4. Do the easy thing

When you’re first starting out, it’s important to do the easy thing. I started on a ukulele, which I’ll admit is quite standard for my generation. I played it in middle school and then left it for about 3 years before I picked up guitar. It was the fresh start I needed. I grabbed my dad’s old classical guitar because it was the easy thing to do. The nylon strings were much easier to play on and build up calluses, and they were much more familiar of a feeling because of my start on the ukulele. When I worked at a guitar store, I used to hear all the time (and still occasionally do) something like, “I was told I needed a steel string guitar because the nylon string won’t build up my calluses”. This makes me mad. What do you even mean? If you were starting your running journey, you wouldn’t put the treadmill on its highest setting, would you? Why do the hard thing? It so often puts people off from learning guitar because they just don’t have the finger strength or calluses to make sound immediately. I say find the easiest thing you can. A player who has nylon string calluses can get steel string calluses easily. A player who has no calluses is going to struggle their way through the steel string process.

This also applies to my writing. I like to say that a lot of the stuff I write sounds complicated but is in reality easier than you think to play. This is because, when I write, I focus on keeping my hands comfortable and using open strings. When there’s a melody I think of that I’d like to incorporate into a part that doesn’t come easily fingering-wise, I will often just tune a string down a half step or up a half step so that it does. Of course, when I’m too far in to a song, that doesn’t work, but it’s often how I find my tunings and start pieces. I just mess around until I’ve found a melody that moves me and then I work on making it as easy to play as humanly possible.

I do hard things too. I like to challenge myself and think it’s important, but I think especially when you’re starting out in the world of guitar, you can get discouraged easily. Things like techniques and calluses take a while to build up. Why make that process hard for yourself to the point where you become discouraged?

5. Play passively

One of my biggest guitar secrets is that my obsession with the instrument descended at a very opportune time. I was in my junior year of high school when I started to really become obsessed with guitar. The pandemic hit and I was stuck doing online school just as my need to be playing the guitar 24/7 was descending. So I played guitar all day during Zoom school. Looking back, I’m sure it was obvious, but I just had it under my desk. Nobody ever said anything.

I can only write guitar when I’m 100% focused on it, but I love the feeling of playing and do it all the time. I attend school in person now, so there goes that grand master plan, but I do love to watch TV and play the guitar at the same time. I’ve found that it’s helped me to really set in that muscle memory and instinct. Often, I will write a part that I can’t play (I have figured it out but it’s too hard to just… do), and so I’ll turn on the TV and zone out while I play it over and over again until it’s second nature.

Playing passively was a huge help to me just getting comfortable with a guitar in my hands. That’s all.

6. Creativity as a muscle

Books have been written about this. This is, I’m sure, very elusive for some. I try to think, like… how did I become so able to let go of my inner monologue and just create? And the real answer is that I was given space to do that from a very young age. I had parents who really believed in letting me do my own thing, especially musically. But I also think that you can give that kind of space to yourself. There’s something that I draw on whenever I write. It’s the same feeling I get when watching the part of a Pixar movie that’s designed to make you cry. That feeling, I think, is inspiration, because inspiration is always very emotional for me. When I hear a really, really delicious melody or experience something I think is profound, I get this tightening in my chest that makes me want to do something about it. To make something. The best thing I can do is practice following that urge.

I have heard people say that you can practice creativity. Exercise it. Sit down every day and journal or write a song. I think that putting a schedule on creativity can silence it, but that there is a bit of inspiration for me at least every day, and I can choose to hold that feeling and grow it when it appears. For me, it’s important that I don’t force it. If something isn’t working, I put it down. I see people who do the “song a day” challenges on TikTok and it just blows my mind. If I did that, I predict I would dread having to make a song probably 80% of the days and that maybe only one of them would be good. I understand the theory that if you just song-vomit and make a million of them, at least a couple should be good, and then you’ll be better at writing at the end of it, but I wholeheartedly disagree. It takes me months to finish a song. Not months of working on it, just a month or so of waiting in between the verse and the chorus, letting things come at their own pace.

When are you at your most cringe but free? Do you like to take long showers and listen to music? Do you love to watch a specific movie over and over? Do you spend hours putting outfits together? Next time you want to write something, try waiting until you feel like that. It’s often after doing something else I really enjoy or that relaxes me that I get my best writing done. Creativity is a strange beast. It’s not about forcing it, it’s about finding it where it is and giving it a little treat. Giving in. If that makes any sense.

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Leave a comment down below so we can really get the discussion going. If you play, how did you learn guitar? Would you go back and do it a different way if you could?

Bonus: This image is my telecaster-style guitar that I first took to Berklee and is still my electric guitar of choice. It is a Schecter PT Fastback II with splittable coil pickups and her name is Alice. I still play Alice very often, mostly with Jesse Detor, a solo project that I play and write the guitar for. You should check Jesse’s stuff out if you like 90’s girl rock.