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Learning Guitar?
Wonder Bread
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I have a lot of free time on my hands, and I was thinking of learning to play an instrument. I'm interested in learning guitar, but I live in a small town, so there aren't any guitar teachers or anything like that, plus I'm not very musical, so I can't usually pick up stuff off of amateur youtube tutorials. Any suggestions?
Wonder Bread on
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For a few specific excercises to get your fingers moving
1) scales - start with a normal major scale and the chromatic scale
2) scales while skipping strings - I mostly do this on chromatic. Instead of going 6th string to 5th to 4th to 3rd, I go 6th to 4th to 5th to 3rd, etc.
It sounds like you don't have the instrument yet, so I'm going to save myself some typing for the moment as most of the things I'd say probably don't make much sense until you can put a guitar in your hands and tinker a bit.
You know doing two things at once. Hard to coordinate when the hands are further apart.
Still cant play guitar.
Study any music theory you can and start memorizing the fretboard. A fantastic thing to study would be learning all major scales (which are easy once you know the pattern). You can google a list of all the major scales in order and then just print it out or keep it window-ed. To go along with this you would want to learn the modes that represent your scales. These are easy as well, and are excellent to practice backwards and forwards on the guitar so you can do them at an instant notice. Use Google as a means to find out what each mode is. Simply type in "list of guitar modes for major scales".
A great way to memorize the fretboard is to find the dots on the fretboard and learn every note on those frets for all 6 strings. Most of them are natural notes and not sharped of flatted so once you learn those notes, you'll know what the next fret over would be.
Make sure you practice the same things every day, but make time to learn new things after you do warmups. My warmups right now are practicing all the modes briefly and running through pentatonics (i'll get to that next).
Pentatonic is a fancy word for a simple thing. Good up the list of Pentatonic scales and you'll find it's 2 notes per string on all 6 strings.
Those are some good things to start with. If you would like to start playing some famous songs, there are plenty of super easy ones that sound amazing and don't require theory knowledge. Some of these would be:
Say it Ain't So by Weezer
Dammit by Blink 182
most Nirvana songs
Wish you were here by Pink Floyd
You can search Google for tabs to these songs and if you are unfamilier with tabs, they work like this:
----0----(e)
----1----(b)
----0----(g)
----2----(d)
----3----(a)
(E)
0 stands for open string (meaning you don't hold any fret down on that string) and the numbers that aren't 0 mean you hold that fret on that string. the lower case e string on the tab is the bottom string on your guitar. so it's upside down. When you see frets behind held down ontop of each other in a tab (like the one above) that means you're holding a chord. This happens to be a C Major chord.
so use Google a lot and start playing around with finding out what sounds good on your own, learn and practice scales and memorize the fretboard and play around with some famous songs to keep yourself motivated and interested.
But I always practice with a metronome. Good timing is pretty essential for any kind of music, I know that I was terrible at keeping to the beat whenever I started learning the guitar.