The age-old question, "how long does it take to learn guitar?". It's natural when starting on a course of learning to ask how long it will take. If you are starting to learn guitar you will be undergoing some changes in the way you spend your time, the way your muscles feel and the way you feel about learning how to play guitar. Right at the start of the course the boring and painful bits are making themselves felt and the rewards are not appearing yet. So how long does it take?

To some degree it depends on how old you are when you start to learn guitar. If you start in your late teens, as many people do, it could take some weeks before you are able to play a few chords and begin to play some easy guitar-accompanied songs. At this age you will possibly have friends who can help you with guitar tips if you don't actually have a teacher. Once you are over the first hump of learning chords you will start to feel that you are developing your own individual understanding of the guitar.

Some people will learn guitar at music school for a couple of years. This will mean taking the guitar a little more seriously and learning a great number of chords and some music theory. You will be learning the guitar from books and DVDs, maybe augmented by some online guitar lessons. You will realize that the guitar is a fairly difficult instrument to learn if you are planning on really mastering it. Playing a few chords for some easy songs is okay but it could take years to get your head around reading sheet music and understanding guitar music theory.

You could speed up your progress by taking advantage f the enormous number of guitar lesson videos and written tutorials available on line. But no matter how much help you have your progress is not going to be rapid. There's no magic bullet, you will learn guitar at your own pace, whatever that happens to be.

Some people concentrate on learning the notes on the guitar fretboard - where all the notes are located. If you use this approach you could stick with learning where all the natural notes are because once you know those, the sharps and flats will be obvious. Once you have an understanding of the major and minor scales and how their intervals work, you should be able to play in all keys.

You will also learn about barre chords. This is a technically demanding part of your quest to learn guitar and many people tend to shy away from it, but once you get the idea of the basic chord shapes that you can move up and down the fretboard, it will not be so daunting.

For many, many guitar players the minor pentatonic scale is the beginning, middle and end of learning guitar. If you know the root note of your song or chord you can match it with a minor pentatonic scale. So you are using five notes to compose and improvise guitar solos. What this means is that inside of a year you should have a reasonable mastery of the guitar and the question of how long does it take to learn guitar has changed for you because you know that every time you play you learn something new.