A building is strong only when the foundation is right. It’s the same case when we begin learning a new art. When we begin learning something new, we should start building our knowledge on that subject in a very structured manner. We need to start right from the scratch, where we need to begin learning everything from the basics, because without the basics your knowledge will be incomplete and we can falter at any time. So, if we are learning to play the guitar, we cannot directly start with the more advanced chords and advanced techniques.

If you really want to learn and master guitar, then you need to start right from the basics and gradually build up on your basics knowledge and add on more and more additional information about guitar playing in order to increase our knowledge base on guitars. You must learn many different things in order to get started with playing the acoustic guitar. First of all, you would need to familiarize yourself with the absolute basics about guitar such as the different parts of a guitar, introduction to the guitar strings, how to hold a guitar, correct posture, tuning the guitar, how to change the guitar strings, correct right and left hand positioning and movement techniques, etc.

Once you have learned all these aspects, you can graduate over to topics of more importance and complexity, such as learning to read musical notations and guitar tablature, learning about key signatures and clefs, different types of notes and rhythms, understanding and recognizing scales (major, minor and pentasonic scales), ear training techniques, exercises for improving finger agility and strength, importance of tempo, timing and intervals, finger-picking, etc. After learning all these basic skills, you can then start learning various aspects of guitar chords such as the introduction to basic major chords (such as A major, C major, D major, E major and G major) and basic minor chords (such as A minor, D minor and E minor), chord progressions, understanding chord diagrams, how to make smooth chord transitions, etc.

Once you have learned everything about basic chords, then you must learn about basic strumming patterns, strumming techniques, strumming exercises, identifying melody, harmony, phrasing, and many other important basic components of guitar playing. Learning so many different aspects of guitar playing is definitely not going to be an easy task and will require a lot of your time and efforts but if you really want to learn & master guitar, then this is an inevitable target to achieve.