I want to stop screwing around and actually learn to play the guitar

learning what notes are in what keys and and what their associated triads are, so i know them automatically instead of painstakingly working it out every time, seems like a hell of a task.

It is a hell of a task, but don't let that stop you. Take your time and work on it gradually. The more you expose yourself to this stuff the more it starts to sink in and become second nature. In addition to the piano recommendation, I think it can sometimes be very helpful to write things out on staff paper, as old-fashioned as that might sound. Just like on the guitar, lots of musical constructions form visual patterns on the staff. Which makes sense of course, as the staff and musical notation is designed to be clear and easy to read. I used to make my students write out a major scale or two every week, and then when they were done with those I'd have that write out different triads. The more you do this stuff the more you start to see the patterns and connections between them and how simple it really is fundamentally.

Approach it a little like learning a foreign language

Makes sense. I still say there's a big difference between playing this

http://g.sheetmusicplus.com/Look-Inside/large/MB-95689bcdpg98.gif

and playing, say, Rock of Ages or a song by The Clientele.

"I want to know why certain things sound good together, how to play in a particular key, what notes you can and can't play at certain times and so on."

I'm not a great guitar player, or anything, but I can tell you that the bulk of what I do know about answering those questions comes from this:

- find the root key, and jam along
- gradually patterns, particularly movable chord shapes, will begin to emerge

This is really the majority of how I learned guitar: pick it up while listening to music, find an entry point to play along (a root note, the key, a chord), and just work from there. Not necessarily trying to learn the song itself -- just learning what shapes, patterns, and chords fit into the song. It's surely not the best or most efficient way to learn (that'll always be good lessons, right?), but you can't do it for long without starting to sort out what other guitar players are doing, what patterns/shapes on the fretboard you can use to move around the chords and notes you know, which little habits and tricks work for what kinds of songs, etc.

(And -- to be clear -- I'm certainly not suggesting that as a great alternative or substitute to actually learning the basic music-theory stuff that's being advised here! But improvising-along is useful, I think, and if you don't have other people around, doing it a few times with a song you're liking ... well, it always teaches me stuff, anyway.)

^pretty much how i picked up guitar, though i was (even more) terrible until i started playing with others

i got fairly good fast when i started out. began like most people playing "smoke on the water" on top E, then learnt chords, a couple of songs, then the pentatonic scale. then i became obsessed with the smiths and got really good at learning johnny marr's guitar riffs by ear (this is that time at like 14 when all you do is play guitar). then discovered television and started doing the same. i think this is where my problems began because my favourite guitarist was tom verlaine obvs and though it was alot harder to learn his solos note for note, timbre for timbre, it was also alot easier to improvise solos in a similar manner

(my brothers followed a similar path except instead of the smiths and television, they were copying slayer and pantera. needless to say, they are much better guitarists)

so now i'm at this point where i'm really good at improvising, and really good at creating weird chords and phrases, but my technique is seriously lacking. i'd love to be able to finger pick or play interesting chord sequences and the relevant scales. i've considered lessons but a few people have warned me off, plus i can't afford them anyway. what would you guys recommend for a guitar player who's already competent but wishes to step his game up? is there one good book for example? is there any exercises i should be practicing daily? or should i go the music theory route and learn some shit on piano?

then i became obsessed with the smiths and got really good at learning johnny marr's guitar riffs by ear (this is that time at like 14 when all you do is play guitar)

Oh man: DITTO, and ditto to the rest of it, too. Last year I actually signed up for these cheesy Line 6 guitar-lesson modules, because I felt like I hadn't learned anything new in too long (the fun part is that they all come with guitar-tone patches for whatever you're learning), but I've just wound up going back and forth between relearning simple stuff (fixing bad self-taught technique) and learning tricks of doubtful usefulness (like sweep arpeggios).

^^ hopefully I will soon use some rad sweep arpeggios in an indiepop song and have to eat my words about usefulness

please do!

Good thread and some good advice.

I'd say, if you really want to do it properly get lessons, or at least have a enough lessons to get the basics of the theory and develop some good habits. I never bothered with lessons and as a result have some bad habits that are fairly ingrained. Definitely play along with as much stuff as you can - you can learn so much that way. Try and work out stuff by ear rather than using tabs - loads of online tabs are absolute garbage anyway. The trick is just to get the key and/or mode and it's surprising how fast a lot of songs become easy. For soloing just learn the pentatonics in a couple of positions and you can do loads.

One of the best tips though is to play with a drummer.

Louie Louie is A D Emin D. Whatever key you do it in the 5th is minor to make it sound exactly right.

i think this is where my problems began because my favourite guitarist was tom verlaine obvs and though it was alot harder to learn his solos note for note, timbre for timbre, it was also alot easier to improvise solos in a similar manner

I have worked out quite a lot of the Television songs by ear and the Verlaine solos are real bastards because they don't follow 'normal' rock patterns and rote licks. The Richard Lloyd ones are a bit more linear but the are some fast bits that I just can't get right.

It's all about the Sonics' take on Louie Louie.

I prefer playing it in G, particularly on keyboards, because the F# on the D Major gives it a little extra lift and keeps the song motoring along. It's like climbing a peak, and the top is just a little bit higher than you thought, which is exciting.
Also in G it's the same progression as Hendrix's version of Wild Thing.

it has to be a d minor though otherwise it's wild thing, surely?
G major C major, D minor.
of course you can do what you like....
only thing wrong with black flag's louie louie was that major d !

It's entirely down to personal taste. In a band with a keyboard player, the D Maj sounds better to me somehow. Without keyboards, just guitars, I think it depends on how fast it's played. Faster than Motorhead's version, I'd opt for the D Maj, slower than Motorhead and I'd go for the D minor.

Actually this thread reminds me that I haven't picked up a guitar for three days.

For more than a couple minutes, neither have I. Working always keeps me from playing :\ Especially when the work I do dries out my hands and makes my fingers crack under the nails.

The time has come. I even dragged it out of storage. I have some books. Wish me luck.

i am left handed and while fretting is fine i have always struggled with the picking side of things. i want to pick up another guitar and finally fuckin learn how to work it this time, is it worth getting a backwards guitar or is it better just to power thru and figure it out?

also affordable acoustic recommendations welcome.

i learnt to pick on an acoustic, but moving to a nylon string was like taking the sandbags off.

been learning guitar for some comedy stuff i want to do later this year - it's going very well so far. i can play a few neil young songs and some willie nelson. i think it's a bit easier when you're older, you know the music you like more and maybe the simple joy of playing an instrument is stronger when you have faced more of the banality of daily life.

there are great tutorials on youtube. i guess my only issue now is whether teaching myself hits a wall - i don't have a lot of structure to what i'm doing, i'm kind of just moving along and picking easy songs to start with.

sounds like the right thing to do. i only had one year of lessons back when i was 15, just to learn the basics, but by 18 I'd let my playing fall by the wayside.
Picked it up again in my mid-20s and found I was able to progress quite quickly into new areas. There's always new stuff to learn and technique to improve on.
One of the best things I did was pick up a bunch of those lyrics and chords books with songs from specific decades that I knew and just learned to play them while singing along. You get used to the chord changes pretty quickly and discover new chords you'd never seen before. Improves your singing ability too.
I really want to know more about scales and soloing now. Not being a trained musician, I feel that it's the theory stuff that lets me down. I can play a pentatonic scale or 'feel out' a lead solo over a bunch of chords, but the stuff we're doing in our band can involve some quite complicated chord progressions and it's getting to the point where I'd like to be able to improvise without hitting duff notes on occasion.

the simple joy of playing an instrument is stronger when you have faced more of the banality of daily life

this is exactly what i am going for

yeahhhh that sounds ridiculous.

I really want to know more about scales and soloing now. Not being a trained musician, I feel that it's the theory stuff that lets me down. I can play a pentatonic scale or 'feel out' a lead solo over a bunch of chords, but the stuff we're doing in our band can involve some quite complicated chord progressions and it's getting to the point where I'd like to be able to improvise without hitting duff notes on occasion.

This is the kind of thing either a good teacher or at least a more formal "guitar method" book can help with (I don't have a specific one to recommend off the top of my head). It also can help if you have any kind of keyboard or piano in the house to help understand the relationships between notes or intervals or chords. But even if you don't, the guitar actually has a beautiful logic to it when it comes to music theory, much moreso than I'd imagine a wind or brass instrument does (although I don't actually know if this is true since I've never played one).

For scale exercises, Sal Salvador's Single String Studies is good (it's not really all exercises played on a single string, it's just single-note picking)

For theory, it can be a long road, but you really need to start with the basics if you don't have them. Learn the notes on a treble staff, learn basic musical notation symbols, and learn how the notes correspond to the guitar (start in first-position -- the position you play basic chords in).

From there I'd suggest learning intervals -- halfstep, wholestep, minor third, major third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, etc. These are the building blocks of chords, and understanding chords is one of the keys to understanding how not to play "duff notes."

A lot of this stuff is probably available free on the internet, on youtube, etc.

thanks man alive, i'll see if i can't dig some of those out.

as a lefty who plays drums right-handed, my advice is to develop a style based on having a shitty right hand.

I'm not the most chop-heavy player, but one thing I can always impress people with is my ability to improvise over pretty much anything, and to learn things easily by ear. I attribute this to having developed my ear and to working on the boring theory stuff that most guitarists skip.

Oh btw I think Single String Studies is all written on staff, so you need to learn how to read notes on a staff before you can use it.

or just get one of these, picking problem solved.

http://www.stick.com/instruments/stick/stick.jpg

is that a chapman stick?

oh sweet, my main problem with regular guitars is that they're not quite phallic _enough_ yknow

have I got a guitar for you

http://cdn.mos.musicradar.com/images/features/outrageous-guitars/penisguitar-630-80.jpg

Dan!!!

when HR takes me away, I will shout over my shoulder "IT WAS WORTH IT" as they lead me from the building

Mods, seize him!

thanks dan that's exactly what i was looking for!

Can anyone recommend a book that is a good beginner's tutorial for playing electric guitar? I've read this thread and I'm not really serious enough to start taking lessons at the moment but a good book would be invaluable. Thanks.

What would you want such a book to have ideally? (All I wanted from a book was to reveal how to make wheedleywoo sounds, which no one has written a good book for)

I think that's what I want to be able to do as well. But if there's no book for it...

Mel Bay's Shredding for Beginners is somewhere in Borges library

What sort of wheedleywoo sounds? Like shreddy metal? Noise?

All of it -- guitar center hero to Glenn Branca

Those are two very divergent paths. Guitar Center Hero = learn scales and modes, work on your tapping, bends, hammer-ons, pull-offs, etc. Branca = buy a lot of pedals and spend a lot of time fucking around, and if you learned scales try not to think about them.

Just find a song that you love and learn how to play it. Then repeat

^ buy the $5 songsterr app for you phone. It plays through the tab and you can slow it down or loop sections. Pick a favorite section of a favorite song. Set it to slow speed. Play along. Ramp up the speed.

the only thing wrong w/ something like this is that it plays all notes at equal volume. So you do eventually need to learn to play it like chet atkins after you learn to play like robot chet atkins.

I want to write an instructional book called "Start Screwing Around and Learn to Play the Guitar"

Troy Stetina's books were recommended to me for teaching hard rock/heavy metal guitar technique and I found them to be successful. The metal lead guitar and rhythm guitar books are the core of the method, although Total Rock Guitar works well for students who are not very advanced. That one assumes that you can fret notes and count a beat and starts you out on power chords. (He uses an 80s definition of 'metal', even including Slash and Hendrix.) Like a good snob, I had my reservations about the reliance on tab and the total absence of standard notation in the metal books but I doubt most people would mind. The metal books might be one side of what you're looking for, Philip?

Branca = buy a lot of pedals and spend a lot of time fucking around, and if you learned scales try not to think about them.

I don't think Branca ever used pedals very much, actually. He has worked a lot with customized instruments and alternate tuning systems (particularly just intonation).

i'll check it out, thanks! (but basically less interested in learning to play all along the watchtower than how to make a guitar sound interesting while it is on fire)

Well, there's always this: http://users.wfu.edu/breckers/howtoplayguitar.htm