I will be upfront with my answer on this. I hate, HATE when advance players tell others to pick a hard song and just keep working on it til they get it. Horrible, HORRIBLE advice.
It makes me mad because some beginners will actually listen to this advice and get frustrated in the process. How is a beginner with a few weeks or months experience supposed to play something an intermediate player may still need a year to learn?
Sadly, a lot of songs most of us want to learn when we first pick up guitar is usually quite difficult. For me, that song was “Cliffs of Dover” by Eric Johnson. I came across the song on Guitar Hero (the game that made me decide to give guitar a shot. I’ve avoided it forever), and it was so beautiful and musical.
It doesn’t sound that hard (especially when you know nothing about guitar), but after learning the basics and taking a look at the tab, I realized, this is going to be one big feat. I didn’t know it then, but it is, objectively, one of the hardest hits to replicate.
I didn’t know how to bend yet. My fingers were barely fast enough to do 8 note timing at 60bpm, but this song has 16 note picking, sometimes more, with triplets and so on. Then there’s string skipping, arpeggios, complex chords, the timing changes throughout, like……………..
If someone told me back then to just stick with it and I’ll get it….I could imagine myself spending 3 years focusing hard on this one song. And at the end, all I know is…that one song. Here’s a comment from the song on Youtube that I truly relate with.
In 5 years, I could have built a setlist of 100+ easy and intermediate songs that I could perform and make money with. I could have mastered my foundation and theory and be creating my own music. Could have learned other impressive solos that don’t require the same speed or mechanics….there’s a lot you could learn in that same time, things you could apply many other places.
So from one beginner to another, please don’t push yourself to go far beyond your skill level to soon. I know it’s tempting, but I’m sure you’re more likely to get frustrated and quit in the process.
Be Careful With Advice From Strangers. Some May Be Leading You Astray…
There are times I legitimately wonder if these players are trying to lead others astray, aka purposely sabotage their guitar growth.
Not everyone online is nice or helpful, and some love to troll and see others suffer. That, or they feel threatened by upcoming players, so they would rather create roadblocks.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a thread on Reddit I saw a while back. A person was looking for EASY anime songs to learn, and they made it clear they are a beginner.
Someone responded telling them to learn “God Knows”. When the poster said they plan to learn it slowly as the intro seems hard, the responder told them to “Keep at it. You’ll be brilliant”.
God Knows is a very popular and well known song in the anime community. If you haven’t heard it, listen to it below.
Here’s a sample of the lead parts:
And here’s a sample of the rhythm.
Hopefully you get the point. This is NOT an easy song, nor is it an intermediate song. I’m almost 2 years in and even I find the rhythm difficult due to the 16th note strumming pattern, constant barre chords (with 7th barres, which is new to me), and change of picking patterns.
For someone to recommend a PURE BEGINNER to take on a song like this is just cruel. There are 100s of easier songs, and they had to pitch one of the most difficult ones. I really have no words.
For The Beginners Out There..
Listen to me. You are a beginner. Play like a beginner. Spend your first couple years learning songs and building your foundation.
I’m saying this as someone who tried to learn songs before I was ready for it, and in the end, I only learned bits and pieces from 25+ songs. Some were too fast to play at full speed, some had difficult parts that I’d skip, and in the end, I couldn’t play one song from beginning to end. I’d usually drop them after a few days and move on to something else.
This year though, I dug long and hard for easier songs that I liked, partly for my band, and I made the effort to learn them thoroughly. I wanted to have a sort of setlist, songs I can pull out and play confidently. I didn’t want to be in the same box I was with other instruments. Only knowing a couple songs well and not being able to create or improvise.
But one thing I know now that I didn’t know then…
Non-musicians will be impressed by anything at this point. And even if your goal isn’t to impress people or show off, just know that you don’t need to be the best-est, fastest, or most unique player to be a good guitarist.
Look at the blues musicians! With simple, sometimes slow notes, they are still great. There’s a lot of pop musicians who only play basic chords and progressions, but people love them.
Then there’s people on TikTok who are fake playing basic single note songs, and still getting 1000s or millions of likes. As long as something sounds good, they’ll love it. You don’t have to play the hardest songs out there. Heck, some songs are overdone at this point, so people won’t be impressed anyways.
So, take your time and enjoy the process. Learn some easy songs to keep you motivated. Then some intermediate songs to push you to learn more, but make sure they aren’t too difficult for you at the moment.
If a song takes you more than a couple weeks to learn, it is too hard for you. If you can play a song at 50% but it is too fast for your hands at 75%, it is too hard for you. If every single chord is new to you and it hurts your hands, it’s too hard for you!
Doesn’t Learning Hard Stuff First Make Things Easier Later?
Yes and no. While guitar is an instrument, half the battle is being able to coordinate your hands, move your fingers in awkward positions, get good at picking and strumming, and eventually build up speed.
A piano doesn’t bring pain to your fingers. Wind instruments, your hands stay in the same position. Brass only has so many buttons…Guitar is a whole nother ball game.
For something like this, it’s comparable to learning a difficult dance when you have two feet. Dancing as a whole takes time to learn. You may play Just Dance and think you are killing it, but when you look at a recording on camera, it’s very clear you are not a dancer. You’re awkward, your lines aren’t clean, a move wasn’t done properly, etc. Sure you ‘did the dance’, but just barely technically.
When a professional dancer is able to do difficult dances, it’s not just that they have the ability to do that dance, but they have worked hard on their flexibility, on their poses, their timing, and their stage presence. They have practice so many different kinds of dances and they slowly, but surely, tweak themselves along the way to become the great dancer they are.
They now have the ability to not only learn harder dances more easily, but they can make easy dances look so much more beautiful and complex due to the skills they have build over the years.
Not to mention, they have the knowledge and experience to learn things right the first time. They notice the small details and can self correct themselves.
Being a beginner and jumping into something too hard too soon is like getting your learners permit for driving and automatically heading to the race track. It’s like attempting parkour for the first time and thinking you can make a jump between 2 4-storey buildings. Like picking up an axe you’ve never held before and going to the forest to chop wood. Playing in the NFL when you can barely hold a football. You are just asking for a disaster.
It doesn’t matter how easy something may seem, doesn’t matter if you’re a fast learner, it’s still better to learn the basics and nuances at a safer level and work up to somethin big like that.
Personally, Songs Are Valuable Learning Material
In my first couple months playing guitar, after attempting songs that were way too hard for me, I decided to just focus on my foundation. I wasn’t interested or motivated in learning most other songs, especially if I would never perform them, so I strictly focused on learning chords, scales, improvising etc, along with music theory.
Yes, I made a lot of progress, but then I had a lot of tools I wasn’t really able to integrate into something. My solos were dull, my chord progressions were always accompanied with a basic strumming pattern, and I’d get bored playing that after 20 seconds. I wasn’t really sure how to move forward or get better.
But after starting my cover band, Chromatic Dreamers, I was more motivated to learn songs, and learn them thoroughly. We picked easy songs that every member shouldn’t struggle to learn and got going.
However, at my skill level, I knew I wouldn’t be able to take on the lead parts for most of the songs we liked the most *cough*God Knows*cough*. Below is a clip from when I was learning the lead parts for Uragiri no Yuuyake. I could barely play the arpeggio bit at 50%.
So, for the sake of the band, I switched to rhythm cause in the end, all that mattered to me was that I got to play with a band on stage. It didn’t matter the role, as long as I was playing.
Most of my first songs were just power chords, and yes, those are easy, but I loved how the Japanese music made it sound more musical through progressions and simple changes to these chords.
It was actually a lot of fun. It didn’t take me too long to learn new songs, maybe a couple days at most. I would work on memorizing it because I hated relying on tabs or dealing with Songsterr which doesn’t allow you to slow it down. I just wanted to have it in my head so I could slow down the song elsewhere, and eventually play full speed.
I made sure to pay attention to the strumming patterns. Some chord changes would start on an upstroke, there would be triplets and other little tricks between songs.
Eventually, we played some songs with barre chords. Power chords are just shortened barre chords, and I’m used to moving my hand around the neck quickly and strumming on time, so I just needed a bit more hand strength to hold down the chords.
A few songs had some simpler lead bits between chords for me, but they also weren’t too hard.
So in under a year, I have about 20 songs I know fully well, along with a few songs I started but switched as I personally wasn’t a fan or because we changed the setlist and was focusing on something else.
Compared to last year, I feel a lot more confident playing, performing, and recording myself. Not to mention, it’s a lot of fun playing to songs you like and sounding like the real track. It’s an amazing feeling and it only makes me want to learn more songs.
Sure, they are ‘easy’ songs, but each song is still new and it’s something to learn from. A new technique, a new chord, a new strumming pattern, a new key…it’s all something that may come again later on, or that I may apply when I create music, and I think that’s more worth my time than mastering one hard song.
This also goes for moving on to new songs and never reviewing old ones. You need to take each song as a learning opportunity. Once you get through some easy songs, add it to a playlist, and review them every week or so.
Review those strumming patterns, practice those slides and bends, get better each time. Get to a point where you can play them from memory, without thinking much. Get to a point where you can perform them whenever needed.
COnclusion
So relax! Take your time. I know you really REALLY want to learn that song, but I’m sure you can find many others you would love to learn too. It may not be as exciting, but as a beginner, you need to play things that not only teach you the basics, but also help build your confidence. Without confidence, you’re going to give up.
And listen to me….anyone who doesn’t play guitar or instruments does not know what is difficult or complex. They will be impressed with anything. People are fake playing simple simple songs on instruments and they are getting millions of likes! They are satisfied with 3 chord pop songs!!!
So don’t take on a beast when you can’t even beat an ant. You’re only going to get frustrated, discouraged, and possibly give up.
One step at a time.
Work towards it.