7 Tips for Older Beginners | Tom Strahle | Easy Guitar | Basic Guitar

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey there my channel has been basically geared towards guitar players who are part-time pretty good players that want to kind of move into that professional arena and start playing full time and maybe support themselves with it that's kind of been my focus I rarely do videos geared towards beginners however I did have a request from one of my subscribers for a video about how to get started if you're an older if you're an older beginner and I actually have a lot of tips for that because I had so many beginners that were older when I was teaching so what I've been to I taught for 35 years so at the age of 15 I was teaching and I had a lot of guys a lot of times I've had students that were older than me and they'd never played before so I kind of came up with some tips for them because their situation is different than my situation when I was 9 years old a I didn't really want to practice but by the time I got to be 1112 I was really getting into it and you know a kid you and your kid you have tons of time to practice and ten tons of motivation and not a lot of distractions so that's a different situation for someone who's in their 40s or 50s or 60s that's picking up the guitar for the first time so I have some real world tips for you and hopefully this it this can actually apply to anybody at any level technically a young person at an advanced level or an older person at a beginner level really doesn't matter these tips will help you in your situation wherever you are so one thing I suggested to my new students that were particularly older they had jobs that had lives they had families they had things they had to do during the week they had to go to the bank they had to go you know whatever they had stuff to do the goal it was I said look just practice five minutes a day and they look at me like five minutes a day that's not enough I said trust me if you say that you have to practice 30 minutes or an hour a day it'll never happen it's like me going to the gym I know that going to the gym is going to be an hour-and-a-half five time I Drive there go to the gym do everything all the workout have been drive back and then take a shower and all that it's an hour and a half out of my day and I don't think there's a day that I have an hour and a half extra to spare so unless I just don't sleep so basically the five-minute rule is the the idea is just pick up a guitar for five minutes and chances are that five will turn into ten fifteen or twenty before you know it you've probably practiced 30 but psychologically you didn't have to set aside 30 minutes but even if you just pick up the guitar everyday for five minutes so that's better than picking it up for 30 minutes one day a week right before your guitar lesson and that's what Sony so many of my students would do is they you know they wouldn't progress and it largely it was because they didn't practice and they didn't practice every day and get the guitar in their hands okay another thing you can do is spring up your guitar with lighter strings so if you play an electric maybe nines or tens nines will be very light lights would be tense extra light on acoustic would be tense and then 12s would be your typical light strings on acoustic so I wouldn't start with heavy strings also I would maybe even take your guitar and have it set up so that it's it plays a little easier lower the action may be it may buzz a little bit but you're really not going for tone you just want to be able to pick up the guitar and enjoy plain okay another thing another common complaint among beginners and this is of all ages is that your fingertips hurt okay well one of the things I've suggested that the new guitar players do when they first start playing is to just kind of dig your thumbnail into your left hand if you're if you're right-handed you're you're fretting with your left hand another way around if you're left-handed dig your thumbnail into the pads of your left hand your pinky your third finger second finger first finger just dig it in you know you could be working on something you could be driving you could be although that might be distracted driving I don't know any any officers out there that can chime in on that but I you know even still I will occasionally dig my thumb nail into my pad just to toughen them up and that way you get to that place where you don't even feel them any sooner you know they're not really causing you problems I don't have calluses anymore I used to get calluses and then occasionally I would they would get you know worn out they'd fall off or break off or chip or crack or whatever fortunately my skin is kind of relearned and just started growing a little tougher so that they're still pretty soft and they're great and so it was much I feel like the tone is better than with a hard callus and I play all day long now okay this one's really important too it's actually really easy to buy a guitar stand okay and the reason is this way you can keep a guitar out you have it out in your living room in your bedroom in your office I would suggest if you're generally if you're taking up guitar later in life most of my older guitar students had better guitars than I had and if you can afford a couple guitars you know maybe put a wall hanger in your office and have a guitar hanging there so if you have any downtime you can grab the guitar down put five minutes in every couple hours you never know when you're going to have that for time same things true and you're looking at over here your your man cave or whatever woman cave whatever you've got a place where you you generally are going to sit down and play guitar keep the guitar out of the case it's it's one less barrier between you and that time that you're going to spend with the instrument this is true for any instrument although I don't know if everyone's gonna have want to have a drum set in their living room set up perpetually but a lot of guys I know do okay so those that's real important stuff another thing is warming up I've got some exercises I'll put some links below some very brutal exercises I've got some beginner exercises some um you don't need to spend a lot of time warming up just a little bit just to kind of get the blood to the fingers and kind of get it going I've got that there's some classical ones that I that I posted one two three four [Music] you could do that one or the one four three four two four three four it's a great line for is for kind of warm working the pinky because the pinky tends to get neglected so much when we're playing another thing another great tip practice efficiently say you've got a song that you're working on and you got it down except for one chord is giving you a problem okay so for example the song is a C chord for a couple bars and geo Mars a minor corner [Music] I can't quite get the F chord and so basically what you want to do is it took me a while to get to that F chord and so what you want to do is you want to because if you're an older beginner you have less time in your day and you have less time left in your life probably nuts not thinking any predictions here but we all want to be efficient with our time and so I find that if I'm if I can just cut to the chase instead of having to wait six bars to get to the problem chord just make up an exercise you're gonna be your best teacher make up an exercise that really works that F chord for example so what I would suggest is do play f courts one strum and C chord once an F that a minor then F that G and back and forth just keep doing that as an exercise in a chord you want to be minor you can practice more efficiently and then you'll find that you'll get that F chord down sooner because you focused on it I learned that years ago when I was spending classical guitar and I would be working on some piece maybe some Villalobos Villalobos piece that was very difficult but I'd have it down except for the last two bars we just drive me crazy well I would just sit there and practice all song gonna be loving this song I'm loving this piece and I'm get to the end and then I'd screw it up and be like oh man and so what I did was I just looped those last two bars and I played him a thousand times until it was so second nature when I got to it I didn't have to think about it so that's kind of what I'm talking about just be more efficient with your practice time okay the other thing I would suggest is learn simple songs don't just my last suggestion for now and and if you have some for me put them down in the comments I'll approve them put them so everybody can can benefit from these but basically don't try to learn really complex on years and years ago when I first started teaching I had a student an older student who never played guitar before was a total beginner and he wanted to learn stairway to heaven that was like his I know it's stereotypical but it's the song you want to learn I must have taught that to a thousand students and you know we're we were basically doing one chord a week it took forever and in a year maybe we got through half of the song he never got it down he got discouraged to quit taking lesson to quit playing and it was my fault because I should have said no no no let's students this song instead let's start with some easy folk songs and Bob Dylan some Eagles that kind of stuff start with some easy songs so you want these little victories start with songs that are fun they're just a few chords that you can get down kind of get those chord changes down get the strumming patterns down keep it simple for the most part and then you see these little victories they're much more encouraging than trying some grandiose thing like trying to learn some Eric Johnson song that's just going to frustrate you and it's going to take you forever because you don't really even have a familiarity with the guitar as a whole so these are just some basic I think basic but good ideas for beginners that are a little older or just for any beginner or these are also great suggestions for you know established players who want to to be more efficient and to get the most out of their time with the instrument okay god bless you I'll talk to you soon and I hope this helps thank you so much for watching I can't believe how much my channel is exploded I'm up to seven thousands of subscribers over seven thousand which is just amazing and it's grown a whole lot in the last month so some of you are out there promoting me I really appreciate that I don't even know I'm just I'm so glad that you're watching and Rasheeda talk to you soon okay I've got more comment don't worry [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Tom Strahle

Views: 3,693,216

Keywords: beginners, guitar lessons, acoustic guitar, leaning guitar, teaching guitar, gibson, gibson guitar, gibson folksinger, tom strahle, guitar stands, guitar hangers, five minutes a day, practice, fingertips, zawinul, zawinul foundation

Id: CkU-qerFLpc

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2018