Guitar starters, one move per page
The twenty-four steps that take a stuck adult beginner to real playing: choosing a first guitar without the gear rabbit hole, tuning before every session with a clip-on tuner and relative tuning, holding the guitar and the calluses that aren't failure, the first four open chords and one-minute changes, strumming as the right hand's one job, songs you actually like from three chords and a capo, the twelfth-fret map of the neck, chords as shapes not theory, the minor pentatonic box as the first lead pattern, slow clean practice, short daily sessions over weekend marathons, recording yourself, and plateaus as consolidation.
A diagram, the classic mistake, and one thing to go try. That's a page.
Guitar starters, one move per page
The twenty-four steps that take a stuck adult beginner to real playing: choosing a first guitar without the gear rabbit hole, tuning before every session with a clip-on tuner and relative tuning, holding the guitar and the calluses that aren't failure, the first four open chords and one-minute changes, strumming as the right hand's one job, songs you actually like from three chords and a capo, the twelfth-fret map of the neck, chords as shapes not theory, the minor pentatonic box as the first lead pattern, slow clean practice, short daily sessions over weekend marathons, recording yourself, and plateaus as consolidation.
Set in Space Grotesk, Inter and JetBrains Mono (SIL Open Font License).
Facts checked against the publishers' own course pages (halleonard.com for the Hal Leonard Guitar Method, justinguitar.com's public beginner course map including its One Minute Changes lesson), Fender's official player support pages for string, tuning and guitar-type facts, standard music-theory references (musictheory.net, Dolmetsch music theory online) for chord and scale facts, and peer-reviewed studies reachable via PubMed (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). Instrument facts (six strings in standard tuning E A D G B E, the octave repeat at the twelfth fret, fret spacing) are stated as standard instrument fact; teaching conventions are named as conventions. None of these organisations is affiliated with or endorses this book.
General information only. Course structures describe the publishers' public materials at the time of writing; editions and requirements change. Sore fingertips are the standard beginner experience, but this book is not medical advice: sharp, joint or wrist pain means stop and check, and see a clinician if pain persists.
Your purchase is for personal use only. You do not have redistribution rights: please do not share, resell, or republish this book or its pages.
© 2026 Steve Hodgkiss. All rights reserved. Personal use only; no redistribution rights.
Edition 1.0 · stevehodgkiss.net
Contents
Starting
What to buy without the gear rabbit hole, tuning before every session, relative tuning by fret matches, and holding the guitar so the hands can work.
- 01A guitar you'll actually pick up
- 02Tune before anything
Fender's official player support pages describe the common guitar types and the parts they share; that a comfortable instrument gets played more is teaching convention, not a measurement.
A guitar you'll actually pick up
Let's say you're three weekends deep in review videos and the guitar hasn't arrived. The comparing costs more than the choosing.
Fender's own pages describe the common types, acoustic and electric, same six strings, same first chords. Teaching convention asks one thing: it plays cleanly enough that you want to pick it up. The gear rabbit hole spends the enthusiasm your practice runs on.
Pick one this week. Playable beats perfect.
Buy or borrow the type your favourite players hold, set a limit, and stop researching the moment it arrives.
Standard tuning E A D G B E is described on Fender's official player support pages; clip-on tuners are the standard beginner tuning accessory, and both method courses open with tuning.
Tune before anything
Let's say you practice for a week on a guitar that has gone flat and conclude you have a bad ear. The guitar was lying to you.
Guitars go out of tune, it is what strings do, which is why the method books put tuning on the first pages. A clip-on tuner reads the vibration through the wood, works in a noisy room, and costs less than a set of strings. Practising on an out-of-tune guitar trains your ear to the wrong target.
Tuned first. Every time.
Clip the tuner on the headstock and tune all six strings before every session this week, before your hands touch a chord.
Standard instrument facts: six strings in standard tuning E A D G B E, low to high, the thickest string tuned to the lowest E (Fender player support pages); numbering the thinnest string the 1st is standard string numbering convention.
Six strings, two of them E
Let's say you look at six strings and see six anonymous wires. They have names, and the names repeat.
From thickest to thinnest the strings are E A D G B E, counted 6th to 1st in standard tuning. The fattest and the thinnest are both E, two octaves apart, so there are five names to learn. Calling strings by thickness, the thick one, the thin one, falls apart the moment you read anything.
E A D G B E. Fat to thin. Two of them are E.
Say the names out loud, fattest to thinnest, before you play, until you don't have to think. Then pluck each string and say its name.
justinguitar.com's One Minute Changes exercise (public beginner lesson): pick two chords, count changes in one minute, a goal of around 60 per minute, working toward about 30 between A and D before moving on.
The one-minute change
Let's say your chords are clean until a song asks you to switch. The switch is its own skill, and it loves being measured.
JustinGuitar's one-minute changes: pick two chords, count clean switches in sixty seconds, write the number down. His course works A and D this way and moves on around thirty a minute; the target is your own progress, not his number. Changing chords only inside songs practises the change at the song's speed, which is the speed you can't do yet.
Sixty seconds. Two chords. One number.
Time A to D for one minute, write the count down, and repeat daily. Watch the number, not the clock.
Distributed practice: spacing the same total practice time across days yields better retention than massing it, Cepeda et al., meta-analysis of distributed practice (PubMed 16719566). The twenty-minute daily routine is this finding applied as a teaching convention.
Twenty minutes, kept
Let's say weekdays vanish and you buy the guitar back with a three-hour Saturday. Your hands spend the week recovering what the last one already lost.
The spacing research is blunt: the same minutes, split across days, keep more than one long session. Twenty minutes at a fixed time, most days, is a habit that survives a busy week. The Saturday marathon blisters the fingertips and hands the progress back by Tuesday.
Same time tomorrow. That's the whole system.
Pick one fixed twenty-minute slot, same time daily, and guard it for two weeks. If Sunday wants more, let it listen, not work.