The first step toward learning acoustic guitar is developing confidence and getting rid of the “I can’t do it” mentality. Your biggest obstacle will not be money, time, or the absence of a good teacher – it will be the belief that you are not the sort of person who plays.
That applies to most crafts and skills, and it is worth naming.
The first weeks are the hard part
Guitar is unusual in having a genuinely uncomfortable start. Your fingertips hurt, chords buzz, and changing between them is slow.
All three resolve. Fingertips harden within a few weeks. Buzzing is a matter of finger position and pressure and improves quickly. Chord changes are pure repetition.
Knowing that these are temporary rather than signs of unsuitability is most of what gets people through.
What to learn first
Three or four open chords. G, C, D and E minor between them cover an enormous number of songs. Learn those before anything else.
Changing between them. This, rather than the chords themselves, is the actual skill. Practise the change, not the chord – move between two chords repeatedly until it stops requiring thought.
A simple strumming pattern. Down strokes only at first. Rhythm matters more than complexity.
With those you can play a great many songs, which is the point – playing actual music is what sustains practice.
Practice
Short and frequent beats long and occasional. Fifteen minutes daily does more than two hours at the weekend, because the hands learn through repetition spaced over time.
Practise slowly. Playing something badly at speed embeds the mistake; playing it correctly slowly and then speeding up does not.
The instrument
A reasonable beginner acoustic, properly set up. That last part matters enormously and is usually skipped.
A badly set-up guitar has strings too far from the fretboard, which makes it genuinely painful to play and far harder than it needs to be. A shop can adjust this cheaply, and it makes more difference to a beginner than spending twice as much on the instrument.
Light gauge strings are easier on new fingers.
Learning resources
Video is excellent for guitar, because you can watch hands and slow the playback.
A teacher is better still, for the same reason it is better for any physical skill – they can see what you are doing wrong, which you cannot.
And play things you like
The fastest route to giving up is practising exercises for music you do not care about. Learn songs you actually want to play, badly at first, and the technique follows.
