I was never much into playing instruments in school and my attempts to learn outside school left me with a bad taste in my mouth thanks to a teacher who did not have the right attitude.
I’m still curious to try it, with all the difficulty and effort it might entail. I figured some posters would be able to provide useful advice or give me a heads up about my current unknown unknowns.
I’m leaning toward the guitar although I’m quite open to hearing about other possibilities. I live in an apartment which makes instruments like trumpets a non-starter for the sake of my neighbors. I’d like the instrument to be comparatively easy to learn and affordable.
I strongly recommend you start with a Ukulele. Like a guitar, but easier, less expensive, there are tons of songs with Uke chords that are easy to find on YouTube or sheet music searches. Live with one for a few months and see what you learn about your interests and abilities and go from there.
You can play trumpet with a mute. Some you can plug your headphones into.
As for what to learn: Try different instruments and choose what excites you the most. Maybe you like the ukulele. Maybe you find out you hate string instruments and end up with an analog synth instead.
I’m slowly working on the guitar. I did banjo for a while, but the longer neck/reach was hurting my shoulder. The banjo did help me learn finger picking which I use on the guitar as well as a flat pick.
It’s taking a long time, but I really don’t care. I enjoy it. Sometimes I have to convince my self to practice, but once I start, it’s hard to stop.
Like you, I took music lessons as a kid (guitar), and didn’t stick with it, and it was something I always regretted.
I started playing guitar again a decade ago, and I’ve enjoyed it a lot. What has really helped me is taking lessons – I have a music school in my neighborhood that accepts (and encourages) adult students, and they lined me up with a teacher who likes the same sort of music that I want to learn how to play (1960s and 1970s classic rock).
What should one look for in either a ukulele or a guitar? I expect that going high-end is probably unwise for a starter instrument but I’d like to know what to look for.
I’ve read that a decent new guitar will cost 150-200$, is that accurate? I’m seeing guitars half that price.
I think the ‘problem’ with ukelele is that you almost have to sing with them, it’s kind of tricky to play a melody on them and make it sound good, or at least that was what I found. Not everyone is into singing.
My tip for whatever instrument you choose is to practise regularly, like ten minutes every day. This works much better than an hour one day and then nothing for the rest of the week. And don’t believe in ‘talent’. Many people think the musicians they like got some special gift that came to them for free. Not so. They practiced and you can get good - or at least better - if you practise too. Enjoy the learning process and don’t get too hung up on being fantastic straight away.
You want the least expensive guitar / uke you can get that can be set up decently. “Set up” means adjusted to make it as playable as possible, so you are not fighting the instrument while trying to practice techniques.
Ukes: most starter Ukes have very little you can do to set them up - they either are playable or really not. If you can have a uke-capable friend help you strum a few, they could tell you if they find one more playable vs. the others on the wall.
Guitars: the things that must be checked are:
Neck Relief - the neck should have the slightest bend, so there is a SLIGHT U when you sight down the neck and use the string as a guide.
Action: once the neck has proper relief, the distance from the strings to the fingerboard needs to get set. Close enough to make fingering chords straightforward without hearing fret buzz.
Intonation: is the string length correctly adjusted? Once Relief and Action are set, string lengths can be adjusted. I could explain why, but suffice to say, a guitar sounds shitty of the intonation is not correct.
When someone says that you should expect to pay, say, $150 - $200 for a decent guitar, they are saying it is made of good-enough parts that someone could do a set-up and the guitar is good enough to take that setup and be playable, and also that it will retain that setup for a while, a year or two even - it doesn’t go out of adjustment if you look at it funny, like truly bad/cheap guitars. This means, of course, then when buying a guitar you need to plan to find someplace local to get it set up and pay ~$50 - $80 to get it done. This is ESSENTIAL AND WORTH IT. Unless you have a guitar-expect friend who can either adjust the guitar themselves or can assure you that the guitar you are buying has already been set up well by the shop you are buying it from.
My Wife bought me my Guitar for Christmas. A kinda expensive Martin. $800. Anyway, one thing I had to have adjusted was the ‘Action’. The strings where quite high over the frets, making it a bit hard on my non calloused beginner fingers.
I had a great deal of fun learning harmonica and it’s really easy to start. As a bonus, you can play virtually anywhere. This is the book I started with and it is very straightforward and a fun read.
Plus, everyone and their dog can play guitar :D; a decent harp player is a treasure.
Yes. Pick an instrument you like and you’re likely to play and practice with, not one that is necessarily easier than another. I don’t like the sound of ukeleles, so it’s doubtful I’d ever have the desire to play one at any skill level instead of smashing it into pieces against a wall a la Bluto in Animal House, but guitar is just so much more satisfying, so if you have your eye and ear on a guitar, go for it! It’s a perfectly good introductory instrument.
I’ve been playing the guitar on and off for about 50 years, and while I’m still not that good at it I know the basic chords and can play well enough to get by. That’s all I ever wanted to do. Learning a new song is a challenge I enjoy, and that forces me to learn new chords now and then and practice a little every day. I started as a kid with a cheap guitar that sounded terrible, and in college upgraded to a Yamaha FG-470SA which sounds pretty good with a fresh set of phoso-bronze strings, and which you can purchase new online for $175.
I had a blast building this banjo kit from Backyard Music.
It has a very soft, woody tone and is really easy on the fingers and really fun to plunk around on. Lots of ways to approach banjo playing and lots of stuff on youtube to get you started. My foray into frailing like Steve Martin just frustrated me but the two finger method is lots easier. Sometimes I tune it like a guitar and play it with a flat pick. (Groans from actual banjo players all around, I’m sure.)
I’ve read that the easiest instrument to learn is a dulcimer.
I have played the guitar for 54 years, and although I would never discourage anyone from it, you may be better off starting with an electric keyboard. I say this because you want to play music, but you’re not sure what instrument. (When I started, I wanted to play the electric guitar without thinking so much about music.) Advantages: You can plug headphones into it and nobody but you hears anything. An acoustic guitar might be heard through thin walls. Guitar requires a lot of practice just to get good enough technique to feel like you are really playing something. Beginners have a hard time pressing down a string in the proper position relative to the fret, take a lot of time to shift left hand positions, and are slow to coordinate the timing between the pick in the right hand with the fretting in the left hand. It takes a while to be be able to play anything that sounds like music. It is more difficult to learn beyond the most basic chords, and the grid layout of a guitar can take a long time to master. With keyboards, you still have to learn proper technique, but the technique is not essential to getting musical sounds out of the instrument. The layout is linear, much easier to see all the notes at once. (BTW never write note names on the keys as a shortcut.)
An electric keyboard requires no maintenance other than the occasional dusting. A guitar (and other stringed instruments) needs to have strings changed (and you will fuss around trying to decide which of the hundreds of types of strings available you want to use next), have action adjusted, have relief adjusted, be tuned just about every time you play. Wooden instruments, especially acoustic ones, also are sensitive to changes in weather that cause you to redo these adjustments throughout the year.
Advantage of a guitar is that an acoustic guitar is eminently portable.
I would start with the keyboard to see if you like playing music, then if you get bitten by the bug, branch out to other instruments.
Just as an aside, do you know if there’s much in the way of instrumental ukulele sheet music, i.e. non-vocal classical or fingerstyle music? As a long time guitarist I’m curious about ukuleles and might want to get one, but not if I have to rearrange everything from guitar music on my own. I’m not much of a singer so I need to be able to play something listenable using just the instrument.
There’s a story about George Harrison from the Traveling Wilbury days. Tom Petty or one of the other there guys noticed that George had fifty ukuleles in the trunk of his car. In response to his asking about it, he was told: “You can never tell when you’ll need one.”
