Name: How to learn guitar: Advice for beginners | Rick Beato and Lex Fridman
Uploaded: 2026-03-09T21:37:40.000Z
Duration: 8 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Gerund

There's a bunch of people listening to this that are curious about how they can start in playing guitar, maybe even playing piano, maybe playing other instruments.

The superlative

Although guitar, of course, is the greatest instrument of all time.

What are the early steps of that journey?

What do you recommend people do in general?

Well, if you're a beginner, getting a good beginner guitar course and learning, first of all, the open chords in first position, a lot of songs can be played that way.

A lot of old songs can be played that way.

So learning a few chords and with an eye towards maybe playing a song.

You learn the chord shapes and you learn how to strum basic patterns to begin with.

I think the first thing for learning guitar is actually how to position your fingers so that you.

You don't mute strings that you don't want to mute.

Yeah, that's the hardest thing for people to do, basically, is to get their fingers arched to where they.

If you're playing a C major chord, your index fingers on the first fret of the B string, and

you have to have that open E string ringing there, and

it's hard for people to make those micro.

You've been playing guitar for I don't know how many years.

And you don't even think about stuff like that when you're playing a guitar solo.

Every little thing that you do, if you're playing your comfortably numb guitar solo, you have to, out of midair, strike the string that your finger's on to play the note.

And these are all fine adjustments that you're doing.

I'm just a hobbyist recreational player, but, wow, you're taking me all the way back.

The physical aspect of it is really tricky.

If you do lead, you have to get a super clean sound.

When you're playing fast, you want it to be super precise.

But when you play slow, when you have one note and you're holding it and you're bending it, it better be really clean.

I guess you have to really place the finger in the right place.

Well, there's the calluses so it doesn't hurt.

And then the positioning of the string on the curvature of our.

You have to have Enough of flesh on it to actually raise the.

Yeah, because you're lifting it with part of a flesh.

And of course, you have to decide, depends how OCD you are, do you want to be like the perfect, the proper musician, or do you want to do a Hendrix?

And so, like you, if you have a fretboard here, I think the more like classical guitarists, the very proper, perfect perpendicular alignment of the fingertips to the fretboard versus, like, Hendrix is like, fuck it, you nerds.

king is also kind of messy looking in terms of his positioning of the fingers, but

So, like, that teaches you that maybe any position can converge towards the super clean tone.

I think a lot of it has to do with how they wear their guitars.

If you wear your guitar low, if you're Hendrix and you're wearing your guitar.

Then you can't get your fingers on top of it like that.

And the thumb acts as a way to mute the lower strings from ringing if you're playing through a loud amplifier.

So there's so many other micro adjustments when you're playing leads because you have to kind of mute the other strings that are.

If you're playing the first note and Comfortably Numb and the solo at the end and you're at the ninth fret of the G string and you bend that and you.

If you bend that G string and you accidentally hit the B string under it, you don't want that ringing.

So you have to kind of angle your index finger so it.

So all these micro adjustments that you don't even think about.

I mean, you're not thinking about that, Lex.

You've done it so many times that these things are just part of your brain.

That's why this is such a great brain developer for kids to learn instruments.

And of course you have to solve that puzzle.

Must be really frustrating in the beginning.

An acoustic guitar for that long, though?

You know, it's actually pretty easy to learn basic stuff.

But the pain is temporary, I guess, is the Point I'm trying to make it is so.