Strumming patterns you’ll just develop a feel for. You can practice that against your knee while just casually listening to the song. An exercise you can do for this is to practice three-chord rock songs. A LOT of songs are written with a progression of A, D, Em. Two examples off the top of my head are Louie Louie and Wild Thing. The difference between them is the rhythm.

I’ve been playing guitar for 25 years now, I do know how to read sheet music from band class in school, but I’ve never combined those two skills. I’ve been handed sheet music for Piano or some other part that had guitar chords over it, and a lot of the more intricate pieces I know I learned via tablature. The nice thing about tabs is they can be fairly easily made with ASCII.

You want a fairly easy way to make yourself sound WAY more impressive? If you’re comfortable strumming chords, you can start picking individual strings instead. I like to use House of the Rising Sun as an example for this. The chord progression is Am, C, D, F, Am, E, Am, E. You can just strum along with a fairly simple rhythm, but, instead of strumming all strings, pick them individually as found in this tab. Your fret hand still does the exact same thing, but your pick hand does a little bit more. This song is a good introduction to this because your pick mostly goes “down” (physically toward the floor toward the higher strings) then back up a couple. It’s also a fairly easy introduction to finger picking.

Fun fact about House of the Rising Sun: It’s in common meter. Which means you can swap the lyrics for other common meter songs into it to interesting effect. Many of Emily Dickenson’s poems are in common meter. So is Amazing Grace and the theme tune of Gilligan’s Island. You can have a lot of fun mixing and matching lyrics with melodies. It’s a fun trick to have in your repertoire when you’re passed a guitar at a bonfire or something.

Put the sheet music down and noodle around every day for a few months

Practise by accompanying your favourite music. That way you don’t get hung up on the strumming pattern and focus on enjoying, which is what keeps you coming back for practice.

There are abundant beginner videos on YouTube that teach strumming. I think the important thing is to mix learning technique with just enjoying making music by any means.

(Source, self taught playing 20 years)

Learn wonderwall by oasis and play it for everyone 😏

Most importantely have fun. Most people will tell you to practice regularly, but that’s only possible if you genuinely enjoy playing. If you go for a daily routine of boring exercises, there’s a chance it will create a loathing for the instrument and the practice, whereas if you do a bit of everything (cool riffs & refrains, tedious exercises, wild experiments, etc), you will build up a virtuous & pleasant realtionship with your instrument, and you will pick it up every day without even thinking about it.

Convince yourself that you’re not improving because you need that one guitar, only to play for one month and let it catch dust afterwards.

I don’t wanna be a buzzkill, but if you’ve only been practicing for a month so far, I’m not sure there’s gonna be any particular resource that’s going to make you improve faster, short of taking formal lessons. It sounds like you’re already making good progress, so just keep doing what you’re doing! Read that book you downloaded, add new finger exercises to your daily routine, and drill the chords and scales and such into your muscle memory so you can do them in your sleep. But this all takes time.

The biggest factor, at least for me, was consistently practicing for years. I’ve been playing for about 17 years now and, by the end of the first year, I had spent hundreds of hours with the guitar in my hand (it was my primary hobby). I’m no rock star, but I got pretty decent by just practicing the stuff I wanted to play and learning the basic fundamental concepts like scales, arpeggios, chord structure, etc.

One good piece of advice my old man gave me: even when you’re not actively practicing, just having the guitar in your lap when you’re working on other stuff winds up making it extremely comfortable to handle. I’d sit with the guitar in my lap while doing homework, or using the computer, and would end up fiddling with it here and there, gradually getting better at navigating the neck, getting more familiar with the distances between the strings, etc.

And use. the. pinky. A lot of guitarists shy away from fretting with the pinky finger if they can avoid it, but they’re doing themselves a disservice. Put in the effort to train your pinky to fret and it will pay dividends when you start tackling more advanced stuff. Even if you can easily hit a note with your ring finger, hit it with the pinky to give the pinky more practice so it becomes second nature.

Find some finger exercises that help teach finger independence. I learned a great one from a Chet Atkins VHS tape back in the day, but I can’t find it anywhere online at the moment; I’m sure there’s a million similar exercises on YouTube though.

If you’re learning a song through a video on YouTube and it doesn’t tell you the strumming pattern or the tuning or whatever, you can probably find that info on Ultimate Guitar. I’m not affiliated with them, just been using their site for basically the entire time I’ve been playing. Has an absolute mountain of chord charts, tabs, yada yada. Very useful.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. 🎸

Slow down. A lot. Slow down a painfully annoying and boring amount and rep the hard chord changes, the weird melodies, any of it. All of good technique is just good muscle memory and muscle memory is only built up through repetition.

Remember that every bad habit that you don’t nip in the bud early can have after effects to your technique for years.

Keep at it! The learning curve is not a straight line, just like with any skill. You’ll see fast progress, just to be followed by a long plateau of no progress or even feel you’re getting worse. And then you notice possibly big improvement again. And again.

Don’t worry about following sheets/chords initially. If chords are not in your muscle memory, you’re basically doing three complex tasks simultaneously, reading, figuring out chords and fingering chords. I’d try to memorize one or two simple pieces first, to get the chords under your belt. Start simple and stay patient, it’ll take time.

Don’t forget the rhythm. Play on top of recordings. You can be pretty liberal with the harmonics, but if you keep a steady beat it’ll probably still sound good.

Try new songs that seem easy till you find one that actually is easy, drill it till you can do it decently, try another song and do the same. That was me 25 years ago and I still love to play.

Learn to read guitar tabs, listen to single parts of the song till you can play that part and keep going till you have each part.

I found it way easier with songs I liked. They were probably harder to play but it kept me interested.

A video of someone playing the song might help with the strumming pattern but you get an ear for it pretty quick.

Practice everyday, look into adjusting the action on your acoustic, and build calluses. Seriously though, practice everyday. There are no shortcuts to get around practice. If you practice anything enough you will get better at it.

I know everyone tries to avoid this and I’m sure you’re trying to learn on the cheap like everyone else, but honestly, get a few lessons with a good local tutor. You’ll learn more from them in a few short hours than you will with months of trying to do it yourself.

Famous guitarists never seem to say how much hard work went in to perfecting their craft, but it is a lot. And all the good ones took lessons and some still take lessons even though they’re on international tours and have sold millions of albums.

The best advice I have for strumming patterns is to just listen to the song and try and just focus on the rhythm. Down strokes sound a little beefier and up strokes are a little more jangly. I’m terrible at identifying chords by ear but can get the rhythm down pretty much immediately. It just comes with time.

As far as playing songs I would not worry about playing just like the recording but just getting close enough that it’s recognizable.

Practice regularly until you get blisters. Go on minimum amount of time until they’re good enough you can play some more until you build callus where you need it.

Don’t give up.