beginner guitar question

[AceLuby]

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I hear this guy's good.

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WORST GUITAR EVER!!! These guitars suck and turn more people off of guitar.

[Jbrochu]

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I would also recommend buying an uber-cheap guitar to start off with

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I disagree. Don't spend a fortune, but know playing uber-cheap guitars sucks and might actually frustrate you enough to make you quit.

[Taso]

^This is true, but in general, as a beginner you need not spend more than $200 on a guitar/beginner package, until you are sure you will stick with it.

Go to www.guitarnoise.com and post questions in the forum there, great community there that I have been a part of for 4 years now.

[wet work]

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It's because they don't really know what they are playing; the songs are just a collection of notes to them. Don't be that person.

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I'm that person. I've been playing guitar for three years. How do I fix me?

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One of the things I like to do is just lay down some rhythm tracks and then just play over top of them trying out different things.

[Yads]

I bought a series of beginner books to learn scales and technique and then started learning songs. Go to music forums. I used to go to harmony central. Not sure if it's still good or not, but check it out.

[brinks]

def get something between $100-200. Perfect starter price and quality is usually decent on instruments in that price range. Having a junk instrument is not a good motivator to want to play. I would know. I had a junk six string for 5 years before i bought an epiphone SG at 14. That SG was my birth as a musician. Quality matters in the beginning!

As for playing: get into a mindset that you must play everyday for a decent amount of time. An hour a day is likely enough to get the basics. When i got into it seriously, i was playing for 2-3 hours a day, every day, 363 days a year prolly, for 2 years. Just learn to love practicing.

Good luck

[Alamo]

Not good for real beginning beginners, but at the moment you are getting the hang of it and would like to venture in trying to play known songs, and just have general help with playing, I can highly recommend Guitar Pro. My wife managed to play a couple of songs after a few months of practicing, she had no previous experience.

So, first try and focus on the technique of guitar playing (the comment by Dave is the best advice in this thread for that matter), if you want to start playing around, guitar pro seriously kicks behind.

Have fun!!

[Oliver Nipples]

1)Learn Tab

2)Go to olga.net, learn then play crappy Jack Johnson song at party

3)Bring your waders to the poonswamp that follows

[dizong]

This is the way I learned (I'm completely self-taught).
First, be freaking motivated. I REALLY wanted to learn Hendrix and Zeppelin and nothing was going to stop me. But fortunately, I also wanted to learn to play Ramones songs. Naturally, that's where I started although I learned bits and pieces of other, more complex songs along the way.

Learn at least some basic music theory. Know what A through G means. Learn what sharp, flat, major, minor mean. Learn the names of your strings.

I think that learning chords is one of the first things you should do.

Learn the open C, G, D, A, E chords. With practice, you'll be able to switch between chords much more easily. But you have to practice it. Once you can play those in succession, you've just learned to play "Hey Joe". You've also learned how to play a portion of "A Day In The Life".

Learn to play power chords. Many Ramones and Who songs are power chords based. These are actually much easier to play than the above open chords.

Learn barre chords, both major and minor. This, in my opinion, is a major stepping stone. You can play almost any song's rhythm portion with barre chords.

Along the way, you'll develop calluses. You have to because your fingers will likely be torn up and even bleed initially. But it will get better.

Simultaneously, learn strumming technique. Initially, all downstrokes will be acceptable but eventually you will have to learn to alternate with various rhythms and such. I don't know how to teach that except that it just comes with diligence and learning to play songs. Just be fluid with the right hand, no need to squeeze the water out of a guitar pick with a death grip.

As for soloing and such, I don't have much advice except much of my playing is based on pentatonic scales and blues licks. There are other scales out there, but I'm not a music theorist and can't really give you more info about that. But once you improvise with this foundation, you'll sound pretty good in most cases.

Oh, and learn tablature to help you learn some songs. It's great to jam but I don't think people try to learn guitar primarily to jam (at least at the outset). Make it a goal to learn those songs that you've wanted to play, no matter how impossible (except for Dragonforce).

[spentrent]

I wish I had taken lessons 15 years ago when I started tooling around with a guitar. I can make up some rockin' [censored] and play along to real songs, but it's all monkey see monkey do.

Hell I just discovered minor sevenths and they blew my mind.

As for soloing I have been in a pentatonic prison for ten years.

I still dig messing around but I feel like with my decent mechanics and rhythm, I could be light years ahead of where I am now. Get lessons and understand music. Don't reinvent the wheel.