Guitar 101

Cafe Society
1

I have never played any musical instrument, but I have always wanted to learn to play the guitar.

So, guitar bought, but now I’d like to learn how to play it.

Can anyone point me to free resources on-line, like youtube or whatever, that are great places to learn how to play from scratch? I can’t even read music.

I have thought about the “Roy Clark Big-Note Songbook”, or something similar. I heard that was surprisingly good.

Searching on youtube gives me a ton of people and videos, but after watching a few,mI realized I could look forever and not find something worthwhile.

So I ask the teeming millions. Any suggestions as to where to start?

Thanks

2

Justinguitar has a free lessons program that seems pretty good for absolute beginners.

3

What did you buy- an acoustic or electric? The way you play them is so different they’re almost entirely different instruments.

New or used? If used, you might want to have it checked by a professional or friend who know guitars- make sure it holds a tune properly, has proper action (space between the strings and fretboard), etc. A guitar that plays badly will frustrate you and kill your progress.

Get a tuner and learn how to tune your guitar.

Learn how to make basic chords- a-b-c-d-e-f-g.

Once you can make the chord shapes and strum without any buzzy or dead strings, practice switching between chords until you can quickly go from say, an E to an A, or A to D and back.

Then practice strumming and switching chords in time to a beat-- try playing an E for 4 beats, then an A for 4 beats, back to E, then B. That’s called a “I-IV-V progression in the key of E”. If you don’t know music theory don;t worry about it for now, just know that certain chords sound good played together, like the aforementioned E-A-B, or A-D-E. Your tuner you bought is probably also a metronome- you can use that to keep a beat by.

Search for YouTube videos that help you with these specific things. IF you know someone else who plays guitar, playing with other people is the best (and most fun) way to get better. Or get lessons from someone.

That should tide you over until better and more knowledgeable guitar players chime in.

Have fun, and don’t try to become Jimi Hendix overnight-- it’s a journey!

4

…and about this:

Probably less than 1% of rock musicians know how to read music. (If you’re learning Jazz or Classical guitar or something, that’s a different matter). Just learn your chords, and for individual notes, as in lead playing, there’s something called “Tablature” or “tab” for short, that shows you what string and fret position to play each individual note. It’s pretty easy to understand, and will show you everything you need to play riffs and fills between chords except the timing-- you listen to the song you’re trying to learn to get the time right. Just google “[song name] tab” to see what’s out there.

5

justin guitar is the absolute best site and its free.

please buy his beginners songbook. all the tabs for his free song lessons. the song lessons are on youtube. its a companion book for the beginners course.
http://www.justinguitar.com/en/PR-102-BeginnersSongbook.php

please support the site. buy something. anything. he’s a great guy and the net can’t afford to lose this great free resource.

6

Justin Sandercoe is the guy with one of the most well-regarded approaches to teaching I know of: http://www.justinguitar.com/

In this thread: So, my 13YO niece wants me to give her guitar lessons - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
I describe my basic approach to how to get started in guitar - I’ll paste in post #12 from me here:
::yawns, stretches on a Sunday morning::

mmmmmyyyyyyeeeeaah? Sorry, just waking up

I hear you. They say they want to play, and you have to figure out: a) are they serious about applying themselves; b) do they have a musical bone in their body; and c) do you have an approach that can help them?

Have dealt with this with my son, my daughter, and dozens upon dozens of folks over the years.

Let’s see if I can tie some of my basic points together -

First - the basic mindset - talk with her and make it clear she understands a few basic points:

  1. Anything (reasonably affordable) that keeps you playing guitar is better. So if you like lessons, a deadline to learn a song (because deadlines help you), a red guitar, a guitar like X plays, or whatever - make the decision based on what will keep you playing. So - if a person does NOT want lessons, or WANTS to hold the pick with two fingers+ thumb instead of the proper 1 finger+thumb, or doesn’t want to do scales - let them for now. Let her come to that need.

  2. The Groove comes first: Scales, chords, navigating the fingerboard, songs - DO NOT MATTER at first. Playing the Smoke on the Water groove on one string, or playing Muddy’s Hoochie Coochie Man riff, or the Peter Gunn theme, or Good Love. Get her playing one-string (or one note each on a few strings - oooo, progress!) and FEELING the groove. Make sure she makes her own crowd noises while she is doing this - it helps . Until she gets a feel for a groove, she won’t know why she is trying to learn chords or scales - the feel she will be looking to have when she uses them, too.

  3. Be okay with Practice - know that there is muscle memory involved. People get discouraged and think they have no musical talent when they really just don’t have enough practice in yet.

  4. Know that you spend 50% working on making the right sounds happen and 50% of your time keeping the other noises you DON’T want from happening - random strings, squeaks - argh! Own it and make sure she knows it’s okay that the other noises happen at first - they are as hard to control as the ones she wants to happen. IT’S OKAY - we all face this!

  5. USE A TUNER! Every goddam time - a poorly tuned guitar is discouraging. And her fingers are going to mess up chords, stretching strings out of tune, etc. - Don’t make it worse with an out of tune guitar. The basics, people.

Within those rules, here are three basic exercises:

  1. Single Note grooves - see above. Show her the Peter Gunn theme on the Low E string (if the open e string = the 0 fret, then the riff is played by 0, 0, 2-0, 3-0, 5-4 - easy to find on YouTube). Also show her That’s What I Like About You by playing the open strings E, A, D D, A A. Play along with with the song. NOTE: She is playing each open string, AND THEN MUTING them by quickly laying her fret fingers on the open string to damp it. In effect, she is playing a simple bass line groove, and practicing some of my Rules - bopping the single note and controlling how long it sustains so that it fits in the groove and she is stopping the noise when she needs to.

  2. Dry strumming - lay her fret fingers across all the strings so they make no notes, only a cool, dry percussive strummy sound. Practice strumming - UP and DOWN - to set up a percussive, strum groove with NO music. I give my folks a stoopid word to remember like Booka-taka, Booka-taka - can they dry strum a rhythm like that? When they are by themselves, a stupid word helps them re-find the strum groove.

  3. Circular Chord Riffs - teach her chord forms for E, A, D and G. Show her That’s What I Like as a simple circular riff E, A, D, A. Or do it for La Bamba D, G, A, G. They always come back to the last chord ready to pick up the first chord and loop around again. This is the hardest of the three - and should come a bit AFTER she gets the single-note groove down and has done some dry strumming without her pick getting hung up.

Final two notes:

  • For the three practice routines I describe above: get in front of a TV with something on that she can watch with half-attention: a sports event, an old show or movie. Work on these exercises - only paying half attention. The goal is to build up muscle memory, NOT to sound perfect. Slop is more than fine - especially for the groove; missing the note is a LOT less important than sticking with the groove. Sitting in front of a TV, watching an old episode of South Park, dry strumming out a Booka-Taka groove - that’s what got my son started.

  • Have fun! If they want to play for 5 minutes - cool! Don’t overly structure their time. The only rule is that for anything fun that they do - e.g., finding the groove for Peter Gunn (they will enjoy it), they also need to do 1 practice thing - e.g., work on D to G transitions.

That’s all for now - she has to want this, so give her space. But these basics set up good habits and a good mindset that make it easier to keep going.

Hope this helps!

7

Well, that’s three votes for Justin. And I believe his first lessons go over all the stuff in Solost’s post.

8

New or used. Holy cow, take this advice whether or not it’s new or used.

In the 80s, I picked up a new, basic Kramer bass. Not a stellar instrument by any stretch, but it was all I could afford. Tried playing it. Kinda played it. Never took to it. Too hard to get even basic notes; too uncomfortable to play for long stretches. Kept to the Rhythm though, fell into percussion and have been playing in earnest for 30+ years now. But damn if I didn’t always love that bass.

I still have it, and every once in a while I’d plug in and fiddle a bit. But never really liked playing more than a little here and there.

Then one day, something I saw somewhere online (can’t remember the mention) got me to thinking I should see about having it ‘set up’. The thought stayed in the back of my mind for a few months until the mood struck and I brought it in to a local shop.

$40 later, I had a completely different instrument. The primary difference was in the distance between the strings and the frets, but they adjusted everything else. It was astonishing.

Suddenly, I could play—easily play—scales and arpeggios and songs with a fluidity and grace I could only have dreamed of the night before. The difference was night and day.

Yes, it’s still a mediocre Korean import from the 80s, but it’s my mediocre Korean import, and now I can actually play it, all because I took the time to have it set up correctly.

9

One tip. I got frustrated learning the strums in the song lessons. There’s so much else to think about. Making the chords and changing from chord to chord is a big deal for beginners.

I went ahead and bought the Strumming dvd from Justin. It’s not necessary to know a bunch of chords. You can practice with just the E chord. A very easy one to make. The easiest way to learn a strum is wrap the fingers around the neck very lightly. that deadens them. Then focus on the strum. you can hear the rhythm much clear with the strings deadened.

Learning the 15 strum patterns first worked much better for me. They are just subtle variations of the same idea. I sat and watched tv. Strumming those deadened strings until I had a smooth rhythm.

Then when I started a song lesson I already knew the strum he suggests using. That’s one less thing I had to worry about. I could focus all my attention on the chords and words.

all depends on how you learn and what works for you.

10

I’ll add two recommendations…

  1. Put off learning the F major chord, or any barre chords, for that matter, for a while. Build up your chord vocabulary first before you start on that one, cause it’s a lot harder than the others for a beginner and it turns lots of beginners into people “who used to take lessons”.

Do you have a favorite band, song, or singer? Get a songbook with the chord diagrams above the melody line. I really started learning with a Beatles songbook and “I Should Have Known Better.” It’s a damned shame I learned in in C, though, because they play it in G, but still…

11

Classic guitarist joke:

Q: How do you get a guitarist to stop playing?
A: Put some sheet music in front of him.

That works for me too, even on keyboards.

** Read WordMan’s post several times. ** Read it a few times now, and read it again in a few weeks, and then in a few months. It’s good stuff.

You picked a great instrument for an adult to learn music on! With most instruments, most people have to study seriously for years before they’re not painful to listen to. With guitar, you can rather quickly get to the point where you can strum simple songs and it’s not only not painful, it might even be enjoyable to others. Especially if someone can sing along.

Learning as an adult is difficult. Kids have these advantages:

  1. they have lots and lots of free time
  2. they have the brains of children, which are simply incredible at learning quickly
  3. they do NOT have highly developed judgement, so they can be happy and feel really good by just doing something simple.

IMHO, the third point is BY FAR the biggest hurdle for most adults. We’ve listened to so much music all our lives, even if we’re not at all serious about listening, we’ve developed remarkably sophisticated judgement about what works and what sucks. And frankly, at first, most of what you’ll try to do will end up in the latter category, by those standards. So, my PRIME RULE for learning as an adult:

Cultivate your inner child!

Really. If you can find a way to enjoy your progress, and spend enough time, you’ll get better steadily.

A couple other suggestions that I believe WordMan left out:

  • Find a way to play with a mentor, regularly. Instruction is great, but a half-hour a week isn’t enough. If you can find someone, like a neighborhood teenager who’s cool enough not to feel uncool playing with a grownup beginner, to meet with regularly and spend at least an hour each time, it’ll be a big help.

  • Put your guitar where you’ll pick it up a lot. Invest in a cheap guitar stand. Do NOT keep the guitar in its case. And PICK IT UP A LOT. 5 minutes 10 times a day works a lot better than 50 minutes once a day!

  • Once you learn a couple chords, practice the transition between the chords. At first it’s hard enough just making the chord shape and strumming. As soon as you have that a bit down, really work on going from one chord to another. Pick any two or three chords that you can play in succession, over and over, until everyone in the house goes nuts (and then find a room). Good timing can’t happen until you can transition between chords easily, and timing is everything. Far, far better to have a total of 4 chords you can transition between, than 12 chords you can’t.

Regarding instruction: I’m self-taught on keyboards (piano, electric piano, organ, synthesizer) and guitars (nylon string and steel string, acoustic and electric, solid body and hollow body electrics, and both with a pick or fingerstyle). Well, people who should know, say my keyboard technique is pretty good, though I never studied it. For the most part, the right way is logical.

But on guitar, I got started on several bad habits, and spent decades unlearning those bad habits, including how I held a pick and how I used my fingers in fingerstyle. I’m still battling some of them.

Conclusion: at least get a few lessons, or make sure you have a mentor who has a clue.

12

Just shoot them!

That’s one of the many mistakes I made. Wow was that hard to break, though thank goodness I’m over it for at least 25 years now. (We’re talking about YOU here, not a son or daughter or friend, though. WordMan’s point was valid, but please, don’t train yourself to hold a pick this way. Trust me on that!)

13

Definitely buy the beginners songbook. I have it and it is fantastic.

Marty Schwartz is the other well known Youtube instructor. I like them both but prefer Justin’s style.

Prepare to be amazed at how many songs you can play with only 3 chords.

14

I find that deeply unlikely.

15

Wow, great timing! I just picked up my first guitar and I’m taking a stab at learning an instrument for the first time in my life.

16

I’ll chuck in another recommendation for Justin’s site.

Beyond that, the sites that I’ve found the most useful:

Ultimate Guitar, which has tabs and chords for every song in the world (more or less).
This handy thing for finding chord names for fingerings. Invaluable for all those times when you think to yourself: “Wow, this chord sounds awesome! WTF is it?” (Which happens more often than you might think, or at least it does to me.)

Plus, a few words of practical advice:

Yes, your fingers hurt. That’s normal. No, it won’t stay like that. Just hang in there for a little bit until you get some [del]scar tissue[/del] calluses, and it’ll be fine.

Yes, all the girls want to go to bed with you now. Don’t be alarmed. This is also normal. You’re a musician. :wink:

17

Another vote for Justin with Marty Schwartz being a close second. I also recommend Rocksmith 2014 if you have an electric guitar. I find that having the backing tracks and the variable difficulty really helps with keeping up the practice. It also has a bunch of games that make learning the fretboard, chords and scales less like work a day more fun. The only thing I don’t like is that you can slip into bad habits if you are using it exclusively. A lesson or two to teach the very basics (holding the guitar and pick, etc) might be a good idea.

18

One last important point that hasn’t been mentioned.

**Have Fun! ** :smiley: That can’t be stated strongly enough. Reward yourself after practice by just rocking out. Play whatever song you love just for fun. If you miss half the notes so much the better. Enjoy yourself.

Everybody improves with practice and time. If something is difficult, break it up into small chunks. Justin recommends short 10 min or less practices a couple times a day for beginners. A lot of his practice drills are 3 mins. Anybody can motivate themselves to do something for just three minutes. Justin knows what he’s talking about. I learned so much from his beginners and intermediate courses.

Did I mention having fun? :smiley: Find ways to make it fun. Learn a few easy, three chord songs from your high school days. Invite over a few friends for beers and a sing along. If you buzz a string or two they won’t care. They’ll be too buzzed to notice anyhow. :wink:

So many people get discouraged and the guitar ends up in the closet. Play as well as you can for whatever level you’re at. Don’t compare yourself to some guy on tv or even a friend that’s played for several years.

19

I taught myself flat-picking and from there, I taught myself to finger pick. There were times I regretted not learning to finger pick Roger McGuinn style instead of standard, Arlo Guthrie style.

Standard, AG style: Thumb pick on thumb, finger picks on index and middle fingers.
RG style: Flat pick between thumb and index finger, finger picks on middle and ring fingers.

RG style makes it easier to switch between strumming, lead picking, and finger picking. But if you’re just starting out, you don’t want to worry about that stuff now. Learn the chords to a song you really like, then start practicing that song. If you want to learn the song enough, that’ll be the incentive to practice it a lot and learn the chord changes. Then move on to another song you really like with some additional or different chords, learn those chords, and practice it to get the changes down. Keep at it and you’ll end up knowing how to play a guitar.

Oh, whenever I find myself teaching someone, I tell them to practice in front of a mirror, so they can see what the chords look like from the front. Because you can learn songs by watching other people play them if you know what chords look like.

20

Why do you find it deeply unlikely? Do you think it’d be greater, or less than even that? I’ve been in rock bands for nearly 30 years. I know of one guitarist that I’ve played with that can probably read music.

I myself could read music for the violin at one time. When I moved to guitar and bass, I didn’t really bother learning to read for them. My bass teacher wasn’t even really interested in teaching me to read a staff. He taught me enough theory to write a bass part for a set of chord changes. If I had kept studying with him, he might have taught me enough to read a chart (or I might have still remembered enough at that point, not sure now).

But, by the time I was in rock bands, it was a useless skill that’s pretty much atrophied away from disuse. No one else could read music, so it was pointless to write anything down for them other than the chord changes. I still play in a band with the guitarist who can probably read music. I assume he can, because he plays keyboards as well, but it’s never come up.
So, to the op:

I’d follow the advice of WordMan, anything that keeps you playing and practicing is useful. I also agree with him about not worrying too much about chords. Start simple. I had hours of fun playing Rebel-rouser before I could do much else on guitar.*

After a coupe of years of lessons on violin, and a few months of lessons on bass, I found the strongest motivator for me was knowing that I had rehearsal with a rock band that week. Sucking in private to a teacher or en masse in public as part of a terrible orchestra was fine, no one was going to get fired**. In the rock band, I knew if I sucked enough, they were gonna replace me. So, I started practicing a lot more, on stuff harder than Rebel-rouser. My teachers certainly taught some of their other students very well, the lessons were enough to motivate them. So, find what motivates you and gets the instrument in your hands.
*It was my third instrument, but the first where chords were common. That riff is basically a bass line, without a chord in sight. I could already do that. Beating on “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on the other instruments until they were recognizable to passerby had finally paid off.

**Though, my bass teacher eventually said: “Look, you’re obviously playing your axe a lot, man. You just aren’t playing the stuff I assign you to play. Quit wasting your money on me.” Yeah, I should have practiced what he assigned more carefully. I eventually worked my way through it, anyway. If you get a teacher, respect them more than I did.