“How I Learned to Play the Guitar”

Guitar is one of the most popular musical instruments to learn because of its versatility and
portability. When I was in 8th grade, I had a friend who is good at playing guitar. I’m always watching
him playing the guitar that made me curious and insecure about his skills and I was encouraged to learn to
play the guitar too. I wanted to do something meaningful and fun instead of wasting time on playing
video games, so I decided to learn a musical instrument. Honestly speaking, I’m also good at singing;
however, singing without a musical instrument to accompany me seemed strange. That is why I made up
my mind to learn to play the guitar.
Now I realize that I made a wise decision. To learn to play the guitar, I asked my mom to bought
me a guitar. In addition, like playing other instruments, learning to play the guitar requires the love of
music, perseverance, and patience. I learned some basic knowledge about the guitar and how to tune it.
To illustrate, the neck of the guitar is divided by the strings from the left to the right and by the frets into
sections from the top to the bottom. Moreover, every guitar has six strings and each string has a different
size and note value.
There are a lot of chords on the guitar, but I could only memorize the most common chords. I
could search for other chords online when I needed them. Now I can play the most important and
fundamental five ‘major’ chords. I spend more than 30 minutes every day practicing without looking at
the diagram of chords. At first, I strummed the strings slowly to see if all the strings rang clearly. When I
could naturally play different chords, I would switch my fingers from one chord to another as quickly and
precisely as possible. In this way, I could connect several chords together to sing a song.
Before long, my fingertips developed calluses and the pain abated. Also, the more flexible and
the stronger my fingers became, the easier I could play the chords. My fingers’ flexibility and strength
turned out to be essential for improvisation on the guitar scales. At last, after learning to play the guitar
for one month, I could play one of my favorite songs, ‘Torete by Moonstar88’ and some other songs with
simple tunes. I didn't enroll in guitar class, I just decided to learn to play the guitar by myself.
The only way to become a good guitar player is to practice every day. It has been said that
professional guitar players practice 8 hours a day, so I knew there was a long way for me to go to become
a good player. I am very delighted to say that I can play and sing quite a few songs at the same time. It
has been rewarding to learn to play the acoustic guitar, as it has opened up a whole new universe of
expression, conversation and real pleasure. It also has been a great way to make friends, so it was worth
making the effort to learn it.