Before you play: tuning, sitting, the pick

On my first evening with a guitar I played the six strings one after another and it was unlistenable. I decided I had no ear. The guitar was out of tune and I was blaming myself.

We will do it in order. First you tune the guitar, then you sit so that nothing hurts after ten minutes, and at the end you get one note out cleanly.

You do not need an ear to tune

I know tuning sounds like something you need an ear for. You do not: switch on the Tuner, play a string, and the screen shows you which way to turn. You keep turning until the reading settles in the middle. You do not even pick the string from a list, because it identifies itself.

The strings are called, from the thickest: E, A, D, G, B, e. Polish songbooks write the second one as H rather than B. The app and these articles say B, and it is the same string.

There is one moment here where you can break something, so I will say it up front. You turn the peg of the string you are playing. If two full turns change nothing, it is the wrong peg.

The second thing: always tune upwards. If you overshoot and come back down by loosening the machine head, slack is left inside it and the first hard strum drags the note flat. Drop half a tone below the target instead and pull back up, and the string will stay where you put it.

Without a tuner you need a reference: a piano, another guitar, or the notes of the open strings. Play the reference, play your string right after it, and pull it up until the two merge into one. You hear it yourself: when the wobble between the two notes stops, the string has arrived. Play both together and let them ring, because in tune they sound like one string, and out of tune they pulse faster the further apart they are.

How often: every time you pick the guitar up. Playing pulls it out of tune, new strings keep dropping for days, and temperature moves the neck. It should take a minute, not be an event.

Sitting: two schools, one criterion

A chair with no armrests, knees at a right angle, feet flat on the floor, back straight. If your legs will not make those ninety degrees, the problem is the chair, not you.

From here the books disagree. The classical school puts the guitar on the left thigh, raised on a footstool, nut level with your jaw. The other rests the waist of the body on the right thigh, so the guitar stands upright instead of lying flat. Start with the second: it needs no footstool.

Both schools watch the same thing and it is the only part that matters: the neck does not droop. Pointed at the floor it loads the wrist of your fretting hand, which has other work today. Keep it parallel to the floor or slightly up, and do not hunch over the guitar to watch your fingers.

The fretting hand: imagine you are holding a ball in it. Wrist straight, thumb behind the neck opposite your index finger, air between palm and neck. Leave the thumb hooked over the top to people who have played for twenty years; an average hand ends up squeezing and stiff.

The pick: grip, angle and how much sticks out

The pick lies flat on the index finger, the thumb holds it down from above, and thumb and pick make a right angle. Hold it firmly, but not so your fingers go white.

How much should stick out past the thumb: the books say anything from two millimetres to over a centimetre. They do agree on the principle. The less sticks out, the more control you have; the more sticks out, the easier it is to drag across six strings. Start with a few millimetres and fix it when the pick slips.

The stroke comes from the wrist, not from the elbow and not from the fingers. Dry run: put your thumb and index fingertips together, shake your hand loosely and notice what moves, because that is the stroke. Strum over the sound hole. Nearer the bridge it turns metallic, nearer the neck it softens: that is tone, not a mistake.

Get a pick on day one; I come back to that at the end of the lesson. Your fingers will play the same notes, and sometimes fingers are the right tool: the thumb takes the three thick strings, the index, middle and ring one thin string each. That is a second way of playing, though, not a substitute for the pick at the start.

One note, played cleanly

Take the third string, the G. Press it at the second fret with your middle finger and play that string alone. It should ring to the end, with no buzz and no dead thud. If not, there are three possible causes and you check them in order: too little pressure, finger too far from the fret, finger lying flat on the next string.

Two things at once. Press with the fingertip, not the pad: a flat finger lands on the neighbouring string and kills it. And put the finger just behind the fret, on the headstock side, not in the middle of the space and not on the wire, where the note dies.

And now the sentence that stays with you for the whole first month. Look for the lightest pressure that still gives a clean note. Press so lightly that it buzzes, then add pressure until the buzz disappears, and stop there. Harder does not sound better, it only hurts sooner.

How much it hurts and how much to practise

Your fingertips will be tender for a week to a month, depending on how often you play; then the skin thickens and the subject goes away. Stiff hands and forearms pass too.

Any other pain means stop. Pain in the wrist tendons, the neck or the back is not a stage of learning, it is a sign that you are sitting crooked. Check two things: whether your wrist is straight and whether you are leaning over the guitar.

How much: ten minutes a day, every day, beats eight hours on Saturday. It is the most repeated sentence in every course I have checked, and the reason is not moral. Fingertip skin needs the breaks, and what you spread over several days stays in memory longer than the same time crammed into one evening.

Now strum the open strings once

Put no fingers down. Take the pick, or your thumb, across the six strings in one movement from the wrist, thickest to thinnest, and listen until it dies away.

That is a sound. Not a warm-up before a sound: six strings of a tuned guitar ring together because that is how they are tuned. Grips start in the next lesson, but that sound is already yours.

What confused me

For the first few days I played a guitar I never tuned, because I took tuning for a skill to learn later. Everything sounded wrong and I drew a conclusion about myself instead of the instrument. You can fret as cleanly as a professional and an out of tune guitar still sounds terrible.

The second one: a string buzzed, so I pressed harder, because nothing else came to mind. It buzzed because my finger sat in the middle of the fret space, and half a centimetre closer to the wire fixed it.

The third one cost me the most. For a year I played with my fingers, quite happy with it, and only picked up a pick once that year was over. It felt like learning the guitar from scratch: my fretting hand knew plenty, my picking hand knew nothing. That is why this lesson tells you to take a pick on day one. The first week goes on repetitions with nothing to show, and that is a normal stage, not a sign that you cannot do it.