My 15-year old niece decided she wanted to learn to play guitar. So she found an old guitar lying around the house, looked up some guitar chords, and then searched on the internet for chord sheets for song she knew. A week later, I came to visit. I taught myself guitar in much the same (albeit pre-internet) way (and at a much younger age). And, initially, ran into some of the same difficulties she has. She had figured out the right strings to put her fingers on, but not the right fingers. It’s okay – the chord works – but if she’s going to actually play over the long term it’ll make sense to put her fingers in places that will be more useful for when she wants to change chords. But if you haven’t been watching people play guitar, it’s hard to know how they actually do it. So for the past couple of days we’ve been having music lessons. And it’s been a blast. I decided to teach her the way I eventually learned (again, almost entirely on my own, although with input from people along the way), and she’s a quick study. It helps that she’s a singer, and going to an arts school, so she knows some basic things about keys and scales. It hadn’t occurred to her that it would be useful for guitar, but once I showed her how it was, she was able to make use of the knowledge. Most guitar lessons, especially for kids, are terrible. They don’t teach you how to play in the way you’d actually want to play. My nephew, 4 years younger, took guitar lessons for 3 years from someone who was teaching him Beatles songs in classical style – reading the melody notes on a piece of sheet music and playing only those. There’s just nothing useful about that: either you want to play classical guitar, in which case you want to learn to play individual notes read off of sheet music (but you probably want to play classical music), OR you want to learn to play Beatles songs, which are played with actual chords. And I’ve seen so many people taught to play chords on music who never learn why they’re playing those chords there or what they mean; the only way they can ever play is by looking at when the music tells them to play what chord. For me, the point of playing guitar is to be able to figure out, on your own, the songs you want to be able to play. So with my niece I started by explaining keys, and how most of the songs you’ll play will use only a few, predictable, chords in a key. (I, IV, V and maybe vi (minor)). So I had her figure out what those chords would be in a particular key, and then we took a song she knew (This Land is Your Land – although they sing it with different words in Canada – “from Bona Vista to Vancouver Island”) and put it the key of C. And I showed her how you probably were going to start on the I chord, and then to listen until the music no longer fit with the chord you were playing – how you knew it was time to change – and then try one of the other likely chords in that key until you find one that does. And so on. And she did a great job – started to get a sense on her own (even before the music started to sound like it didn’t fit the chord) about when a change was likely. (We also worked on how to keep strumming rather than waiting until you've got the next chord in place, so that it sounds like a song -- and your fingers learn that they have to get into place quickly.) The next thing we tackled were chords themselves, and how they’re constructed. We talked about a standard (major) chord being the 1, 3, and 5 notes in the scale (and because she knew something from singing about keys, we could figure out what a scale would be for a given key). And then how you would move the 3 down a half-step to make it minor, or you would add the 7th note to make it a seventh chord, etc. Before too long we were working on things like augmented and diminished chords (because she asked about them – some of the songs she’d found on the internet had pretty complicated chords). And we also talked about what function the different types of chords play in a song. And we talked about what a capo does and why you’d use one, and she was, by herself, figuring out what a chord was when you played it capoed at a certain fret. It’s so much fun! I really do love teaching, and I honestly believe that this is the best way to learn to play guitar, because you know what you’re doing and why, and can therefore figure out the things you want to play.