NationStates Jolt Archive

I've owned both an acoustic and an electric guitar for a little over a year now. For the first few months (perhaps six) after buying them, I tried to teach myself how to play with limited success, but then fell away from it due to lack of time and interest - I felt that I was making little progress and couldn't will myself to put in more effort for what appeared to be little return. I've since moved house, and in doing so, have lost a great number of amenities that I've realised took up a great chunk of disposable time. In other words, I want to start playing again. Unfortunately, I've quite literally forgotten everything I taught myself and I'd rather try to seek the advice of an experienced player in case I went about it wrong the first time round, which resulted in my frustration.

What do you recommend for a beginning guitarist? I really can't afford the expense or time for lessons, so any tips on self-teaching?

Hanging around with other guitarists helps, just look at what they do and try to copy their techniques. Other then that there's not much I can say. If you want to do Jazz you could try learning the chords of a song first, then the corresponding scales/arpeggios to each chord. For blues it really helps that you learn the blues scale in every single position so that you can solo pretty much anywhere, but just using the blues scale can get a little boring. For more specific styles, just try learning loads of songs and you will get a feel for how to play that style. But as long as you practice and you are generally good at music, it wont matter too much how you learn.

Hanging around with other guitarists helps, just look at what they do and try to copy their techniques. Other then that there's not much I can say. If you want to do Jazz you could try learning the chords of a song first, then the corresponding scales/arpeggios to each chord. For blues it really helps that you learn the blues scale in every single position so that you can solo pretty much anywhere, but just using the blues scale can get a little boring. For more specific styles, just try learning loads of songs and you will get a feel for how to play that style. But as long as you practice and you are generally good at music, it wont matter too much how you learn.

Well, I'm lucky in that one of my new flatmates is a pretty good guitarist, so I may pester him for advice too.

I've just started learning the guitar. I have the help of a friend who is a pretty capable and entirely self-taught guitarist. He has started me with 12 bar blues, and we're kind of building round that.

I kind of agree with Hydesland that blues can get boring, but you can always take it and mess with it - pop out of the chord into another one, hit an extra note, hit a half note between B and C, hammer on and off, throw in a whole string of bar chords - just so long as you can get it back on track.

That's it, I'm off to play my guitar.

Anyway - if you possibly can, find a friend or relative who is sympathetic to the cause.