Self taught guitarists: how did you do it? What do you wish you could go back and do differently when you were just starting your guitar playing journey?

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been getting back into guitar playing and trying to have more focused practice when I play each day. I wouldn’t call myself a “beginner”, but I don’t think I’m near the “intermediate” stage yet. I know chords and power chords and can transition between them pretty easily. I’ve been working on figuring out CAGED shapes, but still really struggle with playing scales and “solo-ing”…partly because (1) I have tried exploring music theory and “learning the notes on the fretboard”, but it hasn’t clicked for me yet, and (2) my fret fingers feel sluggish and don’t seem to move across the fretboard with the ease that I seem to have when switching chords.

That said, I’m feeling pretty discouraged right now. Looking for some “pick me ups”, so to speak. And wanting to learn to play a few songs all the way through so I can feel more confident in my ability to actually play a song. But I don’t really want to get hung up on a difficult “solo” or a bunch of individual fretting stuff yet.

As I thought about making this post, I figured it might be useful to also ask about some “beginner tips” on how to best stay motivated to stick with learning, practicing, and playing the guitar. If I’m going to keep this up, I want to really invest in it and stick with the guitar. Here are some additional questions/thoughts to hopefully trigger a discussion.

Fellow guitarists:

  • What has helped you in the past?
  • What helped you get over the “discouraging” first steps of guitar playing and keep at it?
  • What were some of the first songs you were able to learn to play all the way through?
  • How did you learn the notes on the fretboard?
  • How did you learn to play different chords all around the neck?
  • What would you say to your younger self to help encourage them to continue pushing through the sticking points of guitar?
  • What was the “key” to getting guitar playing to “click” in your brain?

Looking forward to seeing what advice fellow players can offer! Everyone’s musical journey is different, and I am interested in learning how you learned to get to where you are now!

2

I’m probably at about the same level as you and I’m much more interested in playing lead rather than rhythm. I’m semi-self taught with a blend of varying levels of instruction.

If I could do it all over, I just wish that I had immediately known that, with scales, you can improvise. I actually have a lot of fun doing that - just spending an hour or so improvising while playing scales.

3

I’m an okay basic guitar player, largely self-taught, though I had a couple friends early on when I started who were great players who helped me and gave me a lot of tips. Which would lead me to my first tip:

Find some fellow musicians to collaborate with. Nothing will improve your playing better than playing music with others. You talk of theory, which is all well and good, but a basic player who understands timing and rhythm (not to mention someone who can gracefully recover from a mid-song flub while staying in time) is more valuable to fellow musicians than someone who knows a lot of theory but does not have timing down.

Figure out what kind of guitar player you want to be. I started at what I thought at the time was a relatively late age (late 20s). My goal was to be able to play simple song chords and sing along, campfire-style. Not too ambitious, and I got that far and more. I learned to fingerpick and play little riffs and fills in songs to make them more interesting than just strumming chords. And that’s about as far as I ever got. If you want to play Flamenco or be another Eddie Van Halen, you got a long road. Not to be discouraging, just saying if you decide what you want out of playing guitar, you’ll be more prepared for what it takes to get there.

It sounds like you’re on the right track, learning ‘CAGED’ shapes and such, and it also sounds like you’re pretty ambitious in what you want to learn. Fortunately for you, you have a huge wealth of online resources I didn’t have when I was starting out. YouTube has tons of lessons and tips for guitar. The quality varies widely, but there’s lots of great stuff out there.

The best tip is, practice practice practice. There is no substitute. There will be days when you feel totally uninspired, that you have plateaued and are not getting any better. Even great guitar players get that way at at times. You just have to play through the discouragement and break through it.

4

All those 19th-century “complete method for guitar” books are useful, even if you are into rock music or folk songs or bluegrass, etc. Because they contain lots of scales and other appropriate exercises and explain how to fret the notes.

5

Start with a good quality instrument. My parents bought me an acoustic (Alvarez) when I was in my teens, and I later bought myself a cheap electric (Fender Squire). Myself and my parents were completely ignorant of what makes a poor vs quality guitar. The acoustic had nearly unplayable high action, and the electric had a combination of high action and fret buzzing due to what was probably a warped neck. I struggled for years to learn to play on them and never understood why I could never develop any speed or clean technique, ending up always frustrated and eventually giving up assuming it was me that was the problem.

Years later as an adult, I had a guitar playing buddy and started fiddling with his guitars. Holy crap, they were magical and easy! I developed more as a player in a couple of hours playing those than I had in my whole prior years of struggling with my own garbage guitars.

I wish I had known, or someone had helped me to find a quality guitar that could have enabled me to learn, rather than been a retardant holding me back from any progress.

6

Oh yeah, great tip. Nothing will frustrate a beginner into quitting faster than a bad playing instrument. It doesn’t have to be top-of -the-line when you’re starting out, but it needs to have decent action and stay in tune for more than a few minutes of play.

When I was starting out, I took a buddy to a guitar shop with me who was not only a great player, but kind of a gearhead when it came to equipment. He helped me pick out a reasonably priced used acoustic that was of good enough quality for a beginner. I still use it for a camping guitar to this day.

7

Even if it’s a crap instrument, take it to a Luthier or guitar store to get it set up. They won’t do it for free but it’s probably less than you think. A guy did one for me for $20 as a loss leader.

Is it acoustic or electric? If the later, how is your string bending and vibrato? This book* taught me those at the right time and it opened a lot of doors for me and inspired me to work harder. It teaches a lot of unintuitive stuff about those topics and others.

You can learn the same topics from youtube (which is an excellent resource) so it doesn’t have to be that book but I do recommend it.

And do play with others. They are teachers in more ways than you know.

* for some reason that book is $200 at Amazon. Don’t pay that much.

8

Be on the lookout for exercises or things to use as exercises for the purpose of working on specific techniques (or for just warming up overall). I recommend playing things that sound musical, because there are plenty of unmusical exercises, and the problem is there’s no reason to play them with feeling or even artistic phrasing because they sound about as musical as a box of wrenches falling down a flight of stairs. It’s an ongoing process, because you’ll eventually get tired of the exercises you’ve been playing, and burnout is to be avoided at all costs. Ideally, you’ll improve and the exercises you’ve been playing will no longer be challenging for you. Either way, “collecting” exercises is a worthwhile pursuit. It’s especially satisfying to compose your own exercises. You notice a technique or passage that’s difficult for you, you figure out why it’s difficult, and you create an exercise that focuses on that difficulty. Play your exercises every time (within reason) you sit down with the guitar, before your performance material, which will only benefit from the warm-up.

Also, make sure you’re using efficient grips. You shouldn’t be flailing around with either hand.

9

I think good advice so far. Make sure it is setup properly, and even better, learn how to do the basics like truss rod adjustment. A defective instrument is maddening because it will never quite tune properly or consistently. For that matter, learn how to tune a guitar correctly. It is both an art and a science, due to the scales and the way they are made.

Exploring alternate tunings will keep you interested when standard tuning starts to get boring. Open D, open G, DADGAD and many others have gorgeous lush sounds and are easier to finger. Joni Mitchell had polio as a youth, and focused on open tunings as standard EADGBE tuning was difficult.

You want a capo or “cheater” to play along with your favorite tunes, change voicings, and adjust to your voice register if you want to sing along. Many, many top hits and favorites were recorded in alternate tunings and/or capos at various frets. Just keep practicing, a little bit every day and you will improve.

Focus on good technique, speed is fine but accuracy is final. I’d rather hear someone play simple things with good tone, then really elaborate complex stuff played poorly. YouTube has plenty of examples of this. There are plenty of tunes that stay in one chord like G that are practically impossible for mere mortals to play. Doc Watson said of his “Deep River Blues” cover “… After about 10 years, I began to learn the lead line”.

10

I finally broke down and hired a teacher some years ago. The first time he had me take on a fairly difficult piece (a Led Zepp song), he gave me a really good piece of advice when he noticed my hesitation: “You can play anything if you slow it down enough. Get it right, first; speed can wait.” It was a sad day when he had to stop teaching because of covid.

11

That’s a good point, YouTube and digital tuner apps have made figuring stuff out WAY easier, too. When a student learns the easy parts first at speed, he/she will slow down on the difficult parts, and tends to always slow down. What’s interesting to me is how many tunes aren’t really played how I think I heard it, till I actually learn the tune.

Back in the stone age, if you wanted to learn how to play a tune note for note you were stuck with constantly dropping record tone-arm down on the record over and over. There were no tabs, or published stuff was transposed from piano or whatever and decided it was in “G”.

And bands were notorious for not necessarily being in standard 440 concert pitch - they might be “down in the cracks” somewhere, in some weird alternate tuning, with a capo on the 5th fret. So trying to figure out how they played a certain tune was a mystery sometime. You’ll hear people say they were trying to learn Jorma Kaukonnen’s “Water Song” in standard tuning. Oops.

That leads me to another interesting observation - some tunes that I would never think I could have learned in a million years because they sound so complex, aren’t necessarily all that difficult to play reasonably well. And then some tunes that are simple standard “cowboy chords” can be quite difficult to play well because of the skill of the guitarist.

12

I’ve found that the best way to improve is to find a song that you really love and that is significantly above your current skill level, and just keep hammering away at it until you get it. You can’t help but improve.

13

After I had played for over 15 years, I discovered that the way to learn how to improvise was to start with arpeggios, not scales.

For years and years, my idea of improvisation was running scales up and down the neck. It didn’t sound bad, just directionless and boring.

Then, I got a jazz book which offered a very simple 3-chord tune and 4 arpeggio shapes per chord in various places as a first exercise. The idea was to improvise by using these shapes only but of course moving from one to the other seamlessly. It was revelatory. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could play a real solo. Sure, it was a very basic one, but it sounded like a solo, not some aimless noodling.

The second step was learning which ornamental notes outside of the arpeggio fit each chord and play just one or two per bar while still focusing mainly on the arpeggio shapes. All of a sudden, I got some real melodies going.

You may want to try that.

14

Yeah, my teacher had me doing that, and he would force me to do improvisational blues riffs, which was intimidating, but fun. Nice thing about YouTube is that you can find videos of nothing but someone playing the 1, 4, 5 progression in most any key while you noodle along improvising.

15

It’s the same way with people who study with a teacher, except we get to ask our teachers if something bugs us enough. Motivation can be just as hard to come by when you hit on something you just can’t seem to get past.

You could also check in with the Great Ongoing Guitar Thread here in the SDMB.

Most of us don’t bite. Much. :smiley:

16

If you’re a beginner (or not!), play every day. Even for a few minutes. Yes, you can have a piece to work on, or scales to master, or whatever. But just touching the guitar daily is a huge lift up and you will progress appreciatively. Do not say, “I’ll practice that on Friday when I have time.” You have a few minutes: do it now. And Friday.

Also find some satisfying piece to warm up with. Three cowboy-chord stuff, doesn’t matter. Play that every day a couple of times until you find a new dumb piece you enjoy. Even for a few minutes. The point is making touching the neck and strumming just automatic. This is the way you get good, fiddling with the instrument constantly, even in a dumb way, makes it instinctive.

17

I was at the “basic chords in three keys” stage when I played at a coffeehouse with a friend, who was an excellent guitarist. If I’d really wanted to learn a ton, really fast, I would’ve convinced him that we (and our bass player friend) should start a band.

Knowing we had a month before our first gig would’ve made me do a crash course in Music Theory On The Fretboard, and I probably would’ve joined Guitar Guy at his lessons from the local old jazz guitarist. And practiced all day, every day.

But I was still in high school, trying to keep my grades up. Our band’s inevitable whirlwind success and international tour would have interfered with my studies… as well as my sleep and sobriety.

Decades later, I did learn a bit of music theory, which did more to advance my piano and guitar work than practicing random songs/licks would have.

18

Yeah, I taught myself as a mid-young teenager. Didn’t know any CAGED system or anything, just copied Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page with the aid of tabs.

Flash forward thirty years, I’m picking up guitar again on a cheap hollow-bodied archtop. Yes, I know now about all the systems of learning chords/boxes, but I know a lot more about music now, so I work on three-or-four chord voicings that include extensions I want in a jazz context, and understand a little bit of how to play various sounds/modes up and down the neck.

I work a lot on sight-reading, and translating that in my head to various ways to play it. Not because I want to be a professional studio cat who can sight read fly shit on guitar, but as a way to organize the fretboard in my head without relying on systems and whatever.

But, same thing as when I was younger, just more disciplined. I keep a few notebooks of tab/staff paper and, for chords, I just hear something nice that Wes or Grant Green did, and either figure it out or read it out of a transcription book, write it down, and if it’s good, put some highlighter pencil on it.

It ends up to be a reasonable handful of “grips” for various chords suitable for jazz. Not cowboy chords, or big-band stuff with the root included, etc. But in the wild chords, as heard on the recordings.

Also, just learning on the fretboard/fingerboard as many bebop heads as I can. So many ways to play those, so I’m thinking it will sink in eventually.

Mostly I just learn a bunch of tunes, the heads, including some comping chords and take it from there.

19

Carulli Op. 241

20

I took some lessons, but discovered early on I could play by ear. I find that if I think too much about what I’m doing it gets a lot harder.