Mastering the Basics: Easy Guitar Warmups for Beginners

Welcome to Day 3 of 30 Days of Guitar! We’re going to learn some easy guitar warmups for beginners, learn how to tap your foot to music, learn a simple strumming pattern, and then complete our Horse With No Name guitar lesson that we started yesterday.

Two simple guitar warmups for beginners

1. Silent switching: switch between chords without playing them. Simply press the strings down, and work on transitioning back and forth to build up muscle memory.
2. Strumming the open strings with downstrokes, focusing on “brushing” them with your pick gently, to get a nice even tone.

How to tap your foot while playing guitar

Tap your foot to the beat of the song. Start slow and look for the downbeat (the “1” or first beat of the measure). As you become more comfortable, you can speed up your tapping to match the tempo of the song. To help keep your timing consistent, try counting out loud in your head or with your mouth as you strum

Horse With No Name Chords & Strumming Play-Along

I play through it VERY slowly in the above tutorial video. We also sing the song together. It is essential that you get used to playing along with me (and eventually the recording), as that’s the fastest way to improve.