Guitar & ukulele guides

Learning guitar or ukulele comes down to a small number of physical habits — how you hold the instrument, how you fret, how you keep time — practised in the right order. These guides cover the first ones, from tuning to your first chord changes, the way our teachers introduce them in lessons.

Start with your instrument in tune, since nothing above that sounds right otherwise, then build your first chord changes in an order that adds one difficulty at a time rather than all at once. Guitar tab becomes useful once you are ready to learn from something other than a teacher standing next to you, translating six strings of numbers into where your fingers actually go.

When you want a teacher watching your hands and correcting a habit before it sets, guitar lessons and ukulele lessons at Trill Route run in Indiranagar, Bangalore and online.

Start with these

• How to Tune a Ukulele: Standard, Low-G and Baritone — get all four strings in tune with a tuner, by ear, or switched to low-G.
• The First Four Guitar Chords, and the Order That Makes Them Easy — learn Em, A, D and G in the order that builds your hand one skill at a time.
• How to Read Guitar Tab in 10 Minutes — read six lines of numbers and know exactly where to put your fingers, bends and slides included.

Related guides

If you want a repeatable structure for turning these into a daily habit, see practice habits. Once a chord change or a riff feels solid, recording and production covers what it takes to capture it at home.