Playing songs on guitar is really what it's all about to a beginning guitarist. I mean, practice scales and warm-up riffs are usually so boring and you're not going to impress all your friends that way.

When they say they want to hear "Wonderwall" by Oasis, you can't do a pentatonic scale and expect the same reaction.

Well, as urgent as it might seem for a beginner to learn songs, there are quite a few steps getting in the way of that goal. Follow these steps to get a song going:

1. You need a guitar.

As obvious as this appears, you can't expect to play songs on guitar if you don't have an instrument of your own. Go out to your local music store and start playing the guitars, asking the employees, and asking your guitar friends what they recommend for you to own.

2. Tuning is the next step.

Once you get that thing home, it's probably not going to be in the right tune. That's why when you pick a few notes, they might sound completely awful. Look up some tuning strategies on a guitar blog site on the internet or ask a guitar instructor about tuning and electronic tuners.

3. Pick a reasonable song.

Now, here's where playing songs on guitar comes into effect, but you can't just pick any song that you want. Think about the music that you're listening to and determine if it sounds like it has a reasonable tempo, if the chords are not too difficult, and if you can possibly sing along.

4. Learn the necessary chords.

Almost every single song ever written revolves around a set of guitar chords to perform, so once you get those down, you're in very good shape. Check out a free guitar tab sites by searching for the chords in a search engine, then looking up the proper finger formations on a chord chart.

5. Analyze the strumming pattern.

OK, so you now have a song and you know the chords. The next step is to understand the rhythm of the song and how it's represented in the strumming pattern. When you're playing songs on guitar, you need to listen to the desired tune over and over to determine what the patterns are and how you can emulate them effectively.

6. Practice often.

So you went through the song fumbling around a couple times and that means you're ready to go right? I don't think so.

The more you go through it, the better you'll become at performing it. Just think about how impressed everyone will be when you can play an entire song completely without a single mistake.

Yea, it takes a few steps to go from a dusty instrument to a performing mechanism, but once you get in the practice and hard work, learning any song that you desire will become second nature and a pleasure to do.