My Guitar And Beginner Difficulties...

I promised I was going to write this piece when it was requested of me. I'm going to go through my difficulties when I started and tips on how to get through them. First problem I had was that I used other people's guitars at first and they were bad because the action was too high. Action is the distance between the fretboard and the string. If it's too high, then holding down even the simplest chords would be excruciatingly painful. Many go through this without knowing that this is the major problem. They think it is normal because people say learning the guitar is hard and they think this is just one of the hard parts. It is in fact not at all normal. Guitar is hard in that you have several scales to practice and several chords to know and understand. Then theory of music is considered boring which makes it hard to learn, but the chords shouldn't be too hard to hold. At least not at the beginning.

Second problem would be the issue of anchoring down with your pinky. Is this right??? Or should you leave your fingers to float while you play??? Well, when I started, I didn't even know this was an age long argument. It came naturally to be to anchor down with my pinky. In fact, after long hours of practice, my pinky joints would be in severe pain. Such was the amount of picking power I drew out of my pinky. Your pinky is not really supposed to be in pain though. But the guitars I had access to were hard and required a lot of force to play, so I guess I just did everything with force. My driving force to practice was just pure love for the guitar. I never even though "why am I doing this? ". It just felt natural to practice since I had nothing better to do. At the time I really didn't have a lot on my plate. So, all these difficulties didn't even particularly attend out to me. I just knew I'd get better at it. The simple answer to the question of of you have to anchor down or not is "do whatever works for you". Try everything out. There's one other thing you want to try and get as where to place your right hand is concerned. You have to try resting the right part of your palm atop the saddle and then again, try it while anchoring down and without anchoring down.

One other thing worth considering would be your plectrum. I started with medium sized plectrums. Like 0.65 to 0.8... but I found that I easily broke them after a while. Especially when I was in hard strumming mode... Maybe to increase the volume of my guitar. So I went for 1.2mm and I found that this was perfect for me. I'm a little hard with my picking, so even after a month the 1.22mm plectrum would be worn out. Again try different ranges. I know people who consider 0.6 too hard. They like the over flexible ones.

Then, when it comes to strumming, you have to let it come naturally. So start very slowly with any strumming pattern you learn, and keep working your way up the bpm. I never used a metronome, but most teachers advice you do.

Hold every chord with the tip of your fingers curling inwards like it would of you were holding a small ball. When trying to learn a chord, pluck the strings one after the other and make sure there's no blunt notes. If you hear a blunt note, then you should feel the vibration of the strings under one of your fingers on the left. This means you're not curling it on and it is muting the string under it, or on top of it.

Above all, practice consistently. Ten minutes everyday beats 2 hours once in a week.

@Greatwolfman ,,, I hope this helped...

Shout out to @Lucifer01 who's existence assures me that if I ever need help with making progress in life, there's a deal waiting to bring me up top!!!