Why Do 90% Of Beginners Quit Guitar? And How Can They Keep Going... ?
In a now famous interview with Fenders CEO Andy Mooney1, Andy stated that:
45 per cent of the guitars that we sold every year went to new players; 90 per cent abandoned the instrument in the first year2
90% is a huge number. It begs the question, why do so many guitar players quit?
After teaching several hundred students locally, we can narrow this down to a few factors:
- Student expectations
- Bad tuition material
- Bad guitar lessons
- Beginner material can be boring
What Do Beginners Expect When They Start Learning Guitar?
Why does anyone learn guitar? Most of the time it’s because they want to play some of their favourite songs. But your favourite songs are often not very beginner friendly. Your favourite musicians probably do not sit down and think “Today I want to write a song that would be appropriate for beginners”. They’re just jamming out riffs and ideas and seeing what happens, jamming away letting their subconscious process years of experience and learning to come up with something new.
Now there are plenty of examples of songs that are beginner friendly, or at the very least, have beginner friendly riffs or parts to them, but we rarely find a song that is good for beginners from start to finish. For example, Smoke on the Water, with one of the most iconic and beginner friendly riffs there is. It has sections that are going to be tricky for the average beginner. If you give someone the riff to Smoke on the Water in their first, or one of their first, guitar lessons, they’ll probably get the hang of it. But there is no chance of them playing all the riffs in that song.
Another problem with the way most people approach guitar is the myth of natural talent, this probably one of the biggest dream-killers when it comes to learning music. Beginners will struggle when learning guitar. Of course they will - they’re beginners! But, this struggle is often interpreted as “I don’t have the capacity to learn to play guitar”, when in fact it should be interpreted as “I’m trying to do something I’ve never done before, this is going to be challenging”. If beginners started with the expectation that it would be challenging, a lot more people would be able to play guitar.
Another expectation beginners have is that they can practice for 30 minutes once a week and make progress. Unfortunately, this is never going to happen. However, with the right beginner program, you can make progress with just a few minutes a day. Something that is vital to long term progress with the guitar is building a habit of daily practice. The challenge for the beginner is that this means they need daily wins in order to help them stay motivated and stick at it, and a lot of beginner material is not designed this way.
Bad Beginner Material
To be blunt a lot of beginner material is not appropriate for beginner guitarists and is too challenging.
Why is this the case?
The problem comes from what is known as “Expert Amnesia”. The person writing the beginner lesson, whether it’s a YouTube video or a course (we’ll talk about in-person teachers later) is the expert. For them, for example, playing a G major open chord to a C major open chord is really easy. Because they find it easy, they assume that it IS easy and therefore appropriate for beginners.
The beginner guitarist is being told that the lesson is appropriate for them, they find it incredibly difficult, and assume, partially correctly, that they cannot play guitar.
I say partially correctly, because the truth is that they cannot play that lesson… at that point in time. But, if they had material that was more beginner friendly, they would be able to make real progress with learning the guitar.
The example with the chords is one that I’ve seen time and time again. For someone just getting started with guitar, full chords, even the ‘simple’ open chords, can be a real challenge to get their fingers around.
Bad Teachers
When it comes to getting started learning guitar, a lot of people make a very sensible decision to seek out a local teacher. Unfortunately, a lot of teachers are quite bad.
My students over the years gave me numerous examples of their experience with teachers prior to taking lessons with me. Some notable cases include:
- A teacher whose lesson was to give students, bear in mind these are total beginner students, a print out tab of a complete song, tell them to learn it, and when they struggle tell them they had no talent and should quit learning guitar.
- A teacher who could give lessons in his shed in his garden (nothing wrong with that) and spend 25 minutes complaining about his life, then 5 minutes showing them something on guitar - plenty wrong with that!
And this is just looking at teachers with an awful attitude! If we then consider teachers with a great attitude but no teaching skills, we can see that teachers with a good attitude and some teaching skills are very much in the minority. And it’s easy to see from the above examples why someone might quit learning guitar.
The sad truth is that a lot of guitar teachers are not very good. They have no patience for the student and they do not understand the difference between teaching a student and demonstrating to a student, or worse, they do not understand that teaching and showing off are two very different tasks!
This isn’t to say that all local teachers are bad - they are some absolutely fantastic ones! But you will have to go through a bit of trial and error to find them.
Beginner Lessons Can Be Boring
There’s no nice way to say this - if you get into guitar because you want to learn Metallica songs, then learning Mary Had a Little Lamb or random chord exercises on three strings is going to be… well it’s going to be really lame. And there’s a good chance that you’ll be learning things like that for several months.
A lot of beginner material is just not that interesting. Which in a way makes sense, because we all have to start somewhere, and we can’t start at the top, we have to work our way there.
But this doesn’t need to be the case. This is usually the case because it’s the simplest solution for the teacher.
But there are ways you can make very, very simple chords, that take two fingers to play, sound really cool.
Surely it’s possible for a good guitar player to write a series of songs that sound cool, are beginner friendly and are fun to play?
The answer is yes - it is possible to do that! More on that later.
How can beginners find appropriate material and learn guitar?
Unfortunately, the only way, as with a lot of things in life, is to try some things out and see what happens.
A good teacher is always going to be the best option, but sometimes that isn’t possible, and the next best option is going to be courses or books put together by good teachers, who understand the specific challenges that beginners face in getting started with learning guitar, who have taught beginners and helped them progress.
A great solution to this program is a new package that Study-Guitar.com is now offering:
- 30 day program for learning your first chords and songs, specifically created to help beginners play something at their level from their very first guitar lesson
- 7 day program to learn your first rock song, from start to finish
The 30 day program helps you get started from your very first lesson on How to Hold the Guitar, and builds up your ability gradually to get you playing simple chords. It comes with a full length eBook and a lesson delivered by email every day, with videos where appropriate.
This is followed by a seven day program that teaches you some riffs and helps you apply the chord skills you learned in the previous program, to playing a full song from start to finish. It also includes a full video of a band playing the song that you can play along to! You’ll get an email once a day to let you know the next lesson is online, and each lesson has a couple of short videos to guide through what to do that day in simple, bite-size steps.
So in total, the program is 37 days long. You’ll start with a 30 day introduction to the guitar and learn some basic chords, that you can play AND sound great, then you progress into the 7 day rock guitar program, where you’ll put those chords to work and learn some riffs, learning your first song from start to finish in those 7 days. It might sound ambitious but don’t worry, this song has been specifically written for beginners just like you… and it sounds cool!