The road toward learning to play the guitar is filled with challenges. Finding the best starter guitar is usually the first hurdle, but thanks to the wide variety of beginner acoustic guitars available, this is easily overcome. 

But what about the other challenging aspects of guitar playing? What can you do about them? Here are two of the most common difficulties that beginners experience and our tried-and-tested advice on overcoming them.

Getting demotivated easily

Many beginners feel that if they are unable to play a song at the end of their first week of learning guitar, they’re a failure and not cut out to be a musician. As a result, they begin to doubt themselves and lose enthusiasm for practice. In some cases, they stop playing entirely.

How to overcome the slump:

You need to understand that learning to play the guitar takes time, and some people learn more quickly or more slowly than others. To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with learning slowly – what’s important is you focus on developing good technique first. Remember why you wanted to learn guitar in the first place, and let that motivate you to keep going.

A week into lessons won’t make you a skilled musician right away, so don’t be disheartened that you can’t play a song just yet. Master the basics and everything will follow. 

Set smaller goals every time you practice and actively track your progress by keeping a log of what you worked on for the day, what you were able to learn, what you need to improve on and your mini goal for the following practice session. If you’re feeling demotivated, review what you’ve accomplished and push yourself to achieving more.

If you’re using an online course with something like Truefire, you can easily join in with the community and try and organize your learning with other wannabe guitarists.

Lack of finger dexterity and accuracy

Beginners can also find it difficult to make the right fingers move to the right strings at the right frets when forming chord shapes and making chord changes. Lack of dexterity in the fingers is also a challenge when picking strings. 

How to overcome finger fails:

Unfortunately there is no magic potion you can drink to develop dexterity and accuracy in your fingers so they hit all the right notes. What you need is good ol’ practice, and lots of it. The more you practice, the better your fingers will be able to remember the right chord shapes and which strings are which. Your fingers will also become stronger, which will certainly let you form barre chords with ease.

There are many finger stretches and warm-up exercises you can do to help your fingers become more capable of the fretting, flatpicking, plucking and strumming you’ll be doing. Doing these exercises really helps make you ready for bigger challenges ahead.

When learning to play the guitar, no challenge is too difficult to overcome. There are always tips, tricks and techniques you can do to get past those hurdles and keep on playing. Enjoy the process and reward yourself for every major accomplishment, then pick up your guitar again and move on to your next goal.