I bought a new acoustic guitar (Alvarez) and took a few lessons. I bought a book, but all to no avail. I just can’t seem to get my fingers around the damn thing. Can any of the great doper guitarists help me with tips and tricks that could make the going less frustrating? Any particular method I should follow? Now I know the first three rules for learning the guitar - practice, practice and practice…but something more would help 
. Not that I am getting much practice, because I tend to slide into self-pity after 10 mins.
A better rule for learning guitar is “Know what to practice, Know how to practice, practice.” What is your specific area of frustration? What exactly are you practicing now? How long have you been practicing? Why do you want to play guitar? What kind of music do you want to play? How committed are you and did you expect to be able to play like <insert favorite guitarist> in a couple months? Let me know and I can set you on the right course of action.
Here are the absolute best books on guitar (and I’ve read all of them):
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The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar, by Jamey Andreas
http://www.guitarprinciples.com/index.html
That should be your first purchase - also check out the website. -
Fretboard Logic Vol 1-3 (2 Books), by Bill Edwards Vol 1-3. www.billedwards.com
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Practical Theory for Guitar, Don Latarski
Every aspect of guitar is covered by those books. When you respond with answers to the other questions I’ll give you the general tips that beginners never like to hear.
ah, a very good rule KidCharlemagne (may call you Kid, or maybe Charle). My specific area of frustration is that I can’t seem to get any better at things I practise at - for e.g. moving from one chord to the next. It seems to be the time lag should reduce with practice. Maybe I should just be more patient, thats usually the key. I have been practicing for all of two weeks. I love music, all kinds, but guitars are really something else. I would really love to be able to play the guitar and sing songs that I listen to everyday.
And no, I don’t expect myself to play like Mark Knopfler at any point in my life. But I would give anything to be able strum Ticket to Heaven (Sultans of Swing, maybe in the next life).
I am practicing genereal chords right now, strum strum strum. Also I have the chords for Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, which I try to master every now and again.
I await your wisdom with bated breath
Patience is key hawkeye.
I’m teaching my girlfriend (been teaching her for about a month) to play, and she’s starting to ge there.
She too find the delay between switching cords dismaying, but I tell her, as I tell you know, it will get better. Don’t get discouraged.
Find songs that you like,a nd look at the tab, see if their easy for you to learn and start strumming.
Good luck.
I’m completely self taught, although I did have many years of piano lessons before picking up a guitar so I at least did know music. The easiest thing to play at first are simple songs with simple chords. It’s just going to hurt for a while until your fingers develop calouses. Once you really build up some calouses and finger muscles then moving from chord to chord will start to go faster.
The most important thing (IMHO) is to find simple songs that you can play and play those. Then slowly work your way up to more and more difficult songs. It’s going to take quite a while to get up to Dire Straits, so don’t get discouraged. Aim for at least an hour a day if you want to progress reasonably quickly. 10 minutes aint gonna do much.
Just had another thought after I hit send. Lighter guage strings and a lower action (string height above the fretboard, adjusted at the bridge) will be easier on the fingers.
Seems like hawkeyejo is having a hard time with hand strength, too. e_c_g gave some good advice but does anyone have any tips for hawkeye regarding hand strength?
I would recommend something but I am no expert on the matter! 
I hate to tell you what you already know, but… practice practice practice! “Time” is the key. Yeah, getting your fingers around the strings is really awkward at first, but it will get easier the more you do it.
Stick with very simple stuff. This means you’ll probably have to play the heck out of songs you don’t even like. I learned to play guitar by playing Bicycle Built for Two and Beautiful Beautiful Brown Eyes over and over and over until I was comfortable playing G, C and D chords.
In fact, get to know G, C, D and Em. If you know those, you can play almost anything. Then learn the basic A, Am, and E, and you’ll have the basics. If you can get comfortable with those seven chords, the rest folllows fairly easily.
Another thing I can’t emphasize enough: Learn the names of the chords!. This is very important if you plan to ever play with other people. That may sound obvious, but you’d be surprised at the number of guitarists I’ve met who don’t know their chord names. Good guitarists, too. I tried to put a band together with one of these guys, and I simply couldn’t play with him. He didn’t know his chord names, and so he couldn’t understand what I was talking about when I tried to tell him the chord progression of a song. If you don’t know your chord names, you’ll just frustrate other musicians who do know them.
But the main thing is to just do it over and over until you’re sick of it, then do it some more. Your fingers will eventually become “trained”, and you won’t even have to think about where to put them.
You also said:
Hallelujah! Somebody spells that correctly! 
(You can imagine how tired I am of reading “baited”)
Former touring rock-band guitarist checking in…
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Learn 3 chords that go together (basic R&R): A,D,E or G,C,D
you can play Louie, Louie, Twist and Shout, Peggy Sue, Johnny B. Goode, La Bamba, etc. This might keep it fun while you learn the others. -
Practice every day and build those callouses. I cut mine on Country Roads and A Horse With No Name, you can do better than that.
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Learn about barre chords and practice those. You can play (almost) any chord in any position once you train that index finger to play capo for you. This will be a breakthrough for you, when you can do that.
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Don’t worry about timing while you’re learning to work the thing. Your strummin’ hand will be fine once your frettin’ hand figures out the drill.
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Find someone else to play with, preferably much better than you. A jam with a friend is 10X better than a solo practice. You learn things and contribute things and you are ALWAYS better off after playing with someone else.
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(Not relevant to this OP): Don’t give a beginning guitarist a crappy instrument. It’s just an exercise in frustration.
Now go play Twist and Shout in A-D-E and have fun!
hawkeyejo there just seems to be no end to bad advice. Doing the same thing over and over again until your sick of it is fine if your doing the right thing to begin with but I’d bet the farm that you aren’t. Brute force practice is the slow road to complete and utter mediocrity. The good news is that the road to excellence is actually a lot shorter; the bad news is that it’s mentally taxing. You will get much better much faster using good technique and understanding how to practice. You must make muscle memory work in your favor. If you are practicing correctly you should see improvement after virtually every practice session.
The book I mentioned in my first reply, “The Principles for Correct Practice of Guitar” is an absolute must. Check out his website at www.guitarprinciples.com. He has a bunch of articles you can peruse but you’ll need and want the book. Here is an essay on practicing chord changes:
Also check out the excellent forums and don’t be fooled by his sometimes new-agey approach to things. Be sure to really surf the site because it’s designed quite poorly and you’ll find yourself stumbling on to whole other areas seemingly by chance. His other book, “The Path Level One: Chords and Rhythm” is a bit skimpy imo, but you can’t get the info anywhere else. That book covers practicing all the chord changes in the key of G and how to change chords with varying levels of interim support. There is also a good lesson on learning rhythm. You will need to have read the first book to understand this one because it builds on the basics. Once you get that first book, get back to me about putting together a practice plan because it can be quite intimidating, or ask any questions in his website forum.
Don't get me wrong, you will have to practice, practice, practice, but make sure your making all three practices worthwhile.The best thing for me was to start going to a guitar teacher. However, I would reccommend this only after learning the basic chords. My problem was that could learn all the chords in the world, but they didn’t sound good when I put them together (got no rhythym). By listening to someone slowly go through what it is supposed to sound like is a real help
As a very novice picker (guitar, not nose… well… ) I discoverd much to my surprise that guitars come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. The one I originally started on was handed down to me by my Dad. Only thing was his hands were much bigger than mine and getting his hand around the neck to change chords went quite smoothly for him. However, my efforts always made these transitions very awkwardly. It wasn’t until I found a guitar with a narrower neck that I was able to move my hand up and down much easier.
KidCharlemagne-
I should have mentioned that, when I was learning guitar I was already a trained musician (piano, clarinet, saxophone, etc), so I already knew music basics. And since I was still young (14, I think) all of my musical training was fairly recent and the “brute force”, repetition method of practice was a familiar and comfortable way to learn. So you make a good point.
Perhaps it’s because I ended up drawn more to being a bassist (I rarely pick up my thin-string guitars these days), but I just have a hard-on for a solid foundation in chord structure and rhythm. When I was a teenager learning to play, I knew all sorts of guitarists whose first guitar was a fancy electric, and who spent all their time learning to shred. These guys could solo and riff all day, but forget asking them to lay down a chord progression. A lot of them couldn’t do it. They’d end up getting into a band on their “lead” ability, and then get kicked out of the band once the rest of the group got tired of listening to them constantly noodling behind the vocalist.
I mean, there is some basis in truth to the joke, “How do you get an electric guitarist to stop playing? Put sheet music in front of him!” G
I’m glad to see that the OP’s guitar is a good acoustic. I’m a strong believer in learning on an acoustic first. Learn those chords first, and the rest will be easier later.
Phase42 I certainly agree with all your other points and was being a bit harsh with the “bad advice” comment. I’m particularly sensitive about that “practice, practice, practice” axiom because I so often hear it as the answer to every question about guitar playing even if their is a legitimate answerable question embedded somewhere in the frustrated rants of the new player. There is just an incredible dearth of good information about how to learn how to play guitar and I find it pretty mindboggling. I can’t believe that the kind of information available in the book I recommended hasn’t been available previously and is still only available in a self-published book on an obscure website. It’s also unfortunate that most technique books available are only geared towards learning to shred mindlessly. I too was happy to see that the OP bought an acoustic. A beginning guitarist would be a better electric guitarist after a year of playing an acoustic than after a year of playing an electric. Plus you look like a total dipstick if you say you’re a guitarist and can’t play an acoustic. Unfortunately, as in many endeavors, the motivations that encourage someone to learn something are often also the obstacles to learning it properly.
I’m new to playing the guitar, having started about 2 months ago. I’ve got a question about tabs you find on the internet, that I’ve not seen answered anywhere, it’s a very simple question, and feel stupid for asking it:
Many of the tabs I come across have half the words from a song line printed, and then a few chord names above specific words in the line, for example:
Well, I’m playing an acoustic guitar, as many of the bands I like use an acoustic as well as an electric guitar. Are the chords to be strummed a single time in tabs like that, for example in the above tab, strum A once, and then E (which would correspond to what the electric guitar on this particular song seems to be doing), or strum a bar of A followed by a bar of E (which sounds nothing like what the acoustic guitar is doing)? Are these tabs solely for electric guitars, or for acoustic? Most of the tabs I download seem to be like this, providing chords for what appear to be the electric guitar as opposed to the acoustic rhythm guitar.
Hope I made myself clear,
TIA.
Bah, the tabs got eaten by the message board. The E is supposed to be just to the right of the three dots in the tab sample provided.
+MDI, many of those “tabs” that you find on the internet, like many at OLGA, aren’t really tabs at all. They just give a basic idea of the chords involved and where the chords are played relative to the lyrics (warning: many of the chords are often dumbed down). Generally you should strum the chord when you get to the part of the lyric that the chord name is hovering over and just improvise a strum pattern (or try and match what you hear on the album) until the next chord. A tab would have the six lines indicating the six strings of the guitar with numbers indicating where to fret and the good ones would tab the rhythm part as well. If you need a lesson on some basic strum patterns to help improvise check this out:
http://www.cyberfret.com/techniques/strumming/101/index.php
If your looking for a tab on the internet I suggest googling for “guitar tab <song name>” rather than just going to OLGA or some tab bot. Shop around with the results because there will most likely be multiple tabs for popular songs, and some will be better than others. If you want really good tabs that are more “note for note” then check out this program (dl a trial):
www.guitar-pro.com
There are huge amounts of songs transcribed note for note for use with this app and you get to hear the song played with midi, and can loop it, slow it down, etc…
Lo and behold, its a miracle. I post a question in the evening and one night’s sound sleep later I find more advice than I know what to do with. I am checking out the website you gave KidCharlemagne. I’ll definitely buy the book, finances permitting :).
You were right about the practice issue - quality matters as much as quantity. I shall try my best not to turn to the dark side.
I am practicing on Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton. The chords are A,D,E,G and C. I think there was a general consensus that these chords would be a good idea for a beginner.
So onwards and upwards.
Just a question about strum patterns. Are there some set patterns, one of which you can fit to a song or do you just play it by ear?
Just tell us what song it is or link me to the tab because ellipses are used to different ends in many tabs.
Well, that was an example that I typed up, based on the first tab I found on my computer. A tab which uses the ellipsis (which I also have on my computer and try to play) by the same group, The Verve, is this one:
http://www.allguitartabs.com/index.php/tab/95299/
The introduction to that one is slightly wrong, it sounds great until you reach the F, at which point in no longer sounds like the actual song.