Getting started on guitar is tough. The guitar is a difficult instrument for beginners as it is quite unforgiving. Your soft skin is not prepared to be fighting against the metal strings and to add salt to your wounds, your guitar might even have a high action making it even more difficult for you to play it. So, what’s the solution to all of these problems? There are two things you can do.
If you are having difficulty playing your guitar, take them to a guitar luthier and have it checked out to ensure that the action is easy for a beginner to play. The second thing is to keep at it. Your finger calluses will take time to form, and till then, it will hurt a bit, but it will be enjoyable, you know why?
Because you can plenty of songs when you are starting out to give you the morale boost you need to keep playing the guitar.
Want to learn the three easiest songs for kids right now? Well, you can learn Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and Jingle Bells on your guitar right now.
10 Easy Songs Kids Can Learn On Guitar
1. Happy Birthday
Happy Birthday is a song that has a lot of unknown history and altercations with copyrights but none of that matters. When you are just a child and want to learn something to play on your guitar.
As a beginner’s guitar lesson, playing this song has been made easy and made to utilize open strings as much as possible.
The use of open strings helps children play the song more easily and quickly.
When you feel comfortable playing the song with open strings and fretting the notes, you can try to move up the neck and play this song in different octaves for fun and practice. Here are the tabs.
2. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
Perhaps one of the sweetest and most popular nursery rhymes, you can very easily learn how to play this song on your guitar as a beginner. What makes this song very beginner-friendly is that it uses every note twice except for a few throughout the song.
Practicing this song can help you develop your skills of rhythm when you try to play this song consistently in any particular tempo or beat.
As simple as it may seem, it is actually a great exercise to practice your rhythm when you are a beginner.
When you feel comfortable playing this song in various parts of the guitar neck, you can even learn the chords of this song to take your skills to the next level. Here are the tabs.
3. Jingle Bells
Even though it is a Christmas song, it is popular among children throughout the year, and you can easily learn to play this song and wow your family at Christmas. With just a little practice you can play the full song merrily for your family.
However, if you don’t feel ready for that yet, you can start by learning just the chorus of the song and learn that to boost your morale.
When you are learning to play the guitar, it’s a great way to approach easy songs and learn them because it can help you build your muscle memory and finger dexterity before you move on to more difficult songs. Here are the tabs.
4. Mary Had A Little Lamb
Following the trend of using nursery rhymes as a starting point to get into guitar, this song goes the same way. It’s easy to play gives you a good morale boost and makes you very popular among your friends when you are just a beginner.
It’s better to be able to play a simple song properly than to play a hard song and not be able to deliver. The tabs are mentioned below. If you want you can learn the chords to this song as well.
The tabs of this song are on the lower register, so for practice, you should learn how to play this higher up the fretboard by learning the notes of this song and the notes on the fretboard.
5. Old MacDonald Had A Farm
This is one of those songs that you can just jam on for hours. That is mainly because it is slow and can be played very easily.
Once you feel comfortable playing this song slowly, the trick would be to learn how to play it faster, you can also use a metronome to play it to any specific tempo and that would be a great practice for your guitar playing skills.
However, as you become more comfortable playing this song, try to replace the open strings with fretted notes to improve your guitar skills further. The tabs are mentioned below.
6. Baby Shark
The insanely popular song that has won kids over for some time now is a very easy song to play on your guitar too.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that this song is quite fast and needs you to pick the strings quite fast. Ideally, this can be a great song for you to learn alternate picking where you play the song with down and upstrokes one after the other.
Or initially, you just play it slow, and then when you are comfortable try playing it faster with alternate picking. Here are the tabs.
7. The ABC Song
A great way to practice the alphabet would be to also learn how to play the song on your guitar. It can make learning a lot more fun and you can use it as a memory trick to always remember the alphabet.
Another fun thing you should know is you can learn how to play this song, and you will learn Ba Ba Black Sheep as well.
These two songs share the same melody so you can learn both songs with the effort of one. Here are the tabs for both the ABC song and Ba Ba Black Sheep.
8. If You’re Happy And You Know It
If you’re happy and you know it, learn this song. It is quite easy to play and the beautiful melody of this song will keep you entertained for a long time.
In my opinion, the best thing for you would be to first learn the melody and then slowly learn the chords of this song as well. It is quite a long melody so have fun learning it slowly and then playing it at full speed. Here are the tabs for this song.
9. London Bridge Is Falling Down
Kids classics are a great starting point for you when you are just starting out on guitar. This song is a great way for you to learn how to play songs with multiple strings.
This is one of the easiest tunes on this list and learning it can be a fun exercise for you in your journey of mastering the guitar. Here are the tabs for this song.
10. Let It Go
Let it go from the Disney movie Frozen is not the easiest song to play but it is insanely popular and kids can easily learn how to play this song with a little bit of practice.
The full song might be too difficult to play at first, so the key would be to learn the chorus first and then tackle the full song.
The chords to this song are quite difficult with tons of changes so I would not recommend going for this song from the direction of chords initially.
However, if you are up for it, it can be a very fun and challenging experience. Here are the tabs for the chorus.
The Importance Of Learning Songs
Learning guitar by approaching it with theory and chords can get boring pretty quickly. You can learn a lot more about music and theory too by just playing songs and exploring the instrument.
However, having a keen and inquisitive mind helps too. You need to sometimes, stop and ask questions as to what you are playing and why you are playing it.
That will help you gain more theoretical knowledge of the instrument and help you compose your own music down the line.
The second reason you should learn songs when you are just starting out is that learning songs gives you a sense of accomplishment and completion.
If you finish learning a song and can play it perfectly from start to end, that just makes you more interested to pick up your instrument.
It may be difficult to reach the end goal, but when you are there, it will be glorious, and you will feel like an absolute rockstar.
Ending Note
So go out there and rock out on your guitar, learn songs and then use that knowledge to improvise and learn more songs and write songs of your own.
The journey of self-discovery with a musical instrument is something that is extremely fulfilling, and after completing 10 years on that journey myself, I can tell you that there is nothing you will love more than it.
Just be sure to stay patient and be diligent, and you will be able to be a great guitar player slowly over time.
Anindya is a Self-taught Musician and a Home Studio Owner who likes sharing his two cents on Guitars, Gears, and Music. You can find his Music on Spotify and YouTube.