It's gonna be a bumpy ride

"Well this is ridiculous. I can't do that and I don't know why it won't make the right noise. It's clearly this guy's fault for asking me to do this, not mine for not being able to do it."

And so, that was that. After less than half an hour I'd decided I couldn't play the guitar. It's that sort of perseverance and commitment I'm expecting to turn me into a proper guitar hero.

It was Christmas Day. I'd got my guitar and had been messing about with it a bit. I found an app on my phone that meant even an idiot like me could tune it. In the weeks before I'd been educating myself about how guitar music is written and looking for some easy songs. Tabs looked pretty straight forward, where the number of the fret you have to put your finger on is written on a line representing one of the six strings on the guitar. Piece of cake.

A Tab - but this one has nothing to do with guitars.

I struggled at a few attempts of such rock anthems as "Jingle Bells" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" before opting to watch a video I'd been looking at on YouTube. No, not one of those videos (for once), but a beginner's introduction to the electric guitar. It was fairly long and after this I'd surely be flying along.

I lasted less than 10 before getting annoyed. The only way things could have been worse was if I'd opted for the video below instead.

After explaining the various parts of the guitar, the video wanted me to play my way up and down the fret on the high E string (confusingly the lowest string on the guitar). I muddled along but, for no obvious reason, half the time the guitar refused to make anything resembling a note. All I could hear was the string twanging but no note. Sometimes it worked, most of the time it didn't, and I had no idea why. And if, somehow, I managed to get even close to mastering this string, I was meant to do the same with the other five strings before moving on.

Aye, like that was happening.

Demoralised, I sat down for the rest of Christmas dinner thinking I'd made a horrible mistake and there was no way I could learn guitar. I started messing about on my phone and looked for apps with lessons. One from a website called GuitarJamz seemed to get good reviews so I gave that a try and I could immediately tell this was going to be better. For starters, the guy in the video was called Marty Schwartz and he was wearing a hat. No one who wears a hat while playing a guitar can be bad!

Marty Schwartz, his guitar and - most importantly - his hat.

This fantastic logic actually paid off as the series of videos went with a different approach. Instead of teaching single note plucking, Marty taught you how to play chords and did so in a fun, light hearted way rather than in a dull, matter of fact style. First up was E minor, which was fairly straightforward. By the end of the day I'd blasted through a few more videos and had added A and D to my repertoire with G following the next day. The man in the hat said there are only six chords needed to play "millions of songs" so I was almost there.

Cords. Not to be confused with chords.

Of course, playing chords on their own is one thing but linking them together is quite another. The penultimate video started off with a chord pattern to play to practice switching between the four I'd already learned. Thinking I'd become quite the guitar player in the space of 24 hours I reckoned five minutes of this was more than enough and cracked on with the next three chords (the mathematically minded of you will have noticed this makes seven and not the six previously advertised).

This was a mistake and I had no one to blame but myself. Trying to learn so many chords in such a short space of time was too much, too soon and I had no hope of linking them up. I had to take a step backward and spent a lot of the weekend practicing playing the original four while watching TV. Only after I felt I could do that - and without looking at the frets to see where my fingers were while changing - did I go back to the final three chords and give them a bash.

So, a few days on, I knew the fingering (quiet at the back) for seven chords and could struggle through them. In my mind it was time for the next step - learning some songs.