10 Guitar Tips I Wish Someone Had Taught Me

Guitar tips can be quick and throwaway but I’m going to share 10 fundamental things that I wish someone had taught me.

Let’s talk about some things that really make a difference to how you play your guitar.

Over 100,000 guitar-learners get our world-class guitar tips & tutorials sent straight to their inbox: Click here to join them

Guitar Tip 3: There’s an easy way to know what lead guitar will sound good

When I first started learning guitar, I focused almost exclusively on chords. I wanted to learn to write songs, so this seemed like the right choice.

Then for years and years, I wanted to play lead guitar (solos & riffs etc), but I didn’t know how to and it just seemed like such a huge and fraught game of experimentation.

I never knew what would sound good or bad until I played it so that made me not want to play.

I was afraid of sounding bad or playing an out-of-tune note. So I didn’t attempt it.

But the ‘secret’ to playing good lead guitar is actually very simple.

If you want to play something on lead guitar and KNOW that whatever you play will sound good, you simply play any note from a scale that matches the key of the song.

That’s it. That’s the ‘secret’.

1. Figure out the key (it will be the first or last chord).
2. Play notes from a scale that match the key.

For example, if the first chord of a song is Am, then you can play any note from the scale of A minor. (Or, to make things simpler, you could play the minor scale in its abridged form: the minor pentatonic scale.)

To learn a lot more about lead guitar, check out our article:

How To Play Lead Guitar: Step-By-Step

Guitar Tip 4: There is a simple way to work out the chords of a key (and vice versa)

All songs have a key. If you know the key, you know the song’s DNA. This is a huge and empowering piece of music theory.

When you know a song’s key…

• You can work out the chords of any song in seconds.
• You can improvise easily by playing ANYTHING in a matching scale/key.
• You can sound like a guitar god when, really, all you’re doing is playing simple stuff that aligns with the song’s ‘DNA’. (It’s a simple concept, but it’s game-changing for how you actually sound.)

So how do we figure it out?

There are no absolute rules in music, but 99% of the time the key of a song is either its first or last chord.

It’s a little more complex than this, but as a beginner all you need to know is that there are 7 chords in a each key.

• 3 major chords
• 3 minor chords
• 1 diminished chord

Forget about the diminished chord. The majors and minors are the ones we use most. I made a short video to explain this guitar tip properly, check it out.

Guitar Tip 5: Get A Teacher

For years I never had a guitar teacher. There were a couple of reasons for that, looking back.

• I never had any money, and guitar lessons seemed very expensive.
• I never felt like a needed lessons. (Which is ridiculous when I think about it now.)

I would look online for guitar tips and tutorials but they were all too disorganised.

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been playing the guitar, or how bad or good a guitarist you are. Every guitarist should have a guitar teacher.

You never, ever stop learning. There is no end to the guitar journey.

Finding a good guitar teacher can take time, and you should expect to go through four or five teachers before you find one that feels like a great fit. There is always something new to learn. A good teacher shares the guitar tips you need to know at the right time and guides and inspires you.

The best thing about having a good guitar teacher is that they will point out blind spots in your knowledge.

(I’ve taught some people who have been playing the guitar for 40 years with a gaping hole in the knowledge that I pointed out to them in the first lesson. It’s not their fault, we don’t know what we don’t know.)

You can find some excellent tips on finding a teacher and how to clearly specify what you want to achieve in this article:

How To Learn Guitar: An 11-Step Programme For Beginners

Guitar Tip 6: Triads Rule. Learn Triads.

This is a valuable guitar tip that will help you sound better instantly.

We won’t get into the music theory here, just know that a triad is the distilled essence of a chord. It’s a chord in its purest possible form.

A Cmajor chord looks like this:

But we can also play it like this:

Within this chord the triad is clear to see:

These three notes played in any way, and in any order, will sound awesome over a C chord, or ANY chord, at ANY time in a song in the key of C major.

Read that sentence again, it’s a very useful guitar tip! 🙂

Let’s explore this a little more…

You don’t need to play any of the notes on the 3rd fret in the image above. Just those 3 notes on the 5th fret. Squish them down with one finger. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

I don’t want to make this article all about triads, we’ll move onto other guitar tips in a moment, but I’ll quickly show you two other C triads:

And this one, which sounds awesome:

Listen to ‘The Bucket’ by Kings of Leon to hear how awesome simple triads can sound.

Remember, you can use these triads for ANY chord, not just C major. They are all moveable shapes.

If you want to play D major, just move all these triads up 2 frets. Want to play E major? Move them up another two frets. And so on.

Triads sound amazing and are so easy to do. This is a really cool guitar tip so give it a try! (Start off with the A shape triad, the first one I showed you.)

Guitar Tip 7: Show Your Axe Some TLC

When I first started playing guitar I don’t think I changed my strings for the first two years.

I left my guitar lying around and whilst I never treated it badly, I certainly never ‘looked after’ it.