guitar NEWB thread

What makes you think I'm not!

question: does it make sense to bring examples of the types of things I'm most interested in doing with a guitar into an initial lesson or is that jumping the gun/potentially prejudicing the teacher's ability to show me the fundamentals?

I don't see what harm it would do

Definitely do that.

xxxpost cos I've heard you play on an ILX comp and you're pretty good?

Shucks, I'd forgotten about that

zomg I just realized that I had completely forgotten to try playing Siouxsie songs

"Night Shift" here I come FUCK THE MOTHERS KILL THE OTHERS

Do you have any books with chords in them? As a permanent guitar NOOB myself, I recommend Chords and Progressions for Jazz and Popular Guitar, by Arne Berle for the chords and then one of Rikky Rooksby's guitar books for chords plus arrangements of songs.

(I'm just assuming that ultimately single note stuff is going to end up being pretty easy for you)

hey y'all

I haven't contacted a teacher yet because I feel like I should get my wisdom teeth taken out first. I know that logic doesn't make much surface sense but in my head it TOTALLY makes sense.

I have gotten VERY tired of playing the C scale on strings 1-3 and have started walking up and down all 6 strings. I also kind of stumbled across E, E7, Emin, Emin7 and C and have jamming back and forth between them. I also found some chord that I am CERTAIN is the first chord to "Love Will Tear Us Apart" but I can't recreate it now. Also been playing the intro to "Crystallised" over and over.

how are current Epiphones? their version of the Gibson ES-339 is only $400 online, which seems pretty affordable

aww djp i meant to ask you how this was going on saturday!

ha I am still kind of struggling through on my own, although I have like 3 ppl I need to contact re: lessons

I can now play C, E and Emin chords! Also I am pretty sure the opening chord to "Love Will Tear Us Apart is just the third string/third fret but I haven't looked it up to confirm. I've also been teaching myself the opening to "Crystalized" and the main guitar riff to "Dull Life"

Been recommended this site, pretty comprehensive free video lessons, will check them out myself when I get a mo:

http://www.justinguitar.com/

Dan, you should definitely learn the E and A chord shapes - those are the most important shapes once you start playing barre chords). throw in D and you can play songs w/I-IV-V progressions!

E major(/minor) = 022100(/022000) E-B-E-G#-B-E (E-B-E-G-B-E)
A major(/minor) = 002220(/002210) E-A-E-A-C#-E (E-A-E-A-C-E)
D major(/minor) = x00232(/x00231) x-A-D-A-D-F# (x-A-D-A-D-F)

don't forget the fingering! (231/12 or 23, 123/231, 132/321). trivial or ymmv you might think but i played D as 231 for ages, which is definitely bad and wrong.

I play E minor the exact same as E major except without fingering the G string, so it's easy to switch between the two if necessary. My guitar teacher taught me to do it that way.

wait how do you play d minor as 321 and not 231, my fingers are not physically capable of doing this afaik

oops yr right, i knew i'd make a mistake. e minor like e major makes sense but i tend to use first two fingers anyway if i'm not playing e major or say playing esus4 as well, nothing wrong with using more than one fingering if it suits the occasion.

altho 234 for esus4 works too, always good to get the little finger in on the action.

Guitar is fun! My advice, if you're teaching yourself, is to familiarise yourself with the main open chord shapes and then start learning tunes from Ultimate Guitar chord tabs - you'll get used to switching between them pretty quickly.

Any sites that teach you country picking?

There are a few good lessons on http://www.premierguitar.com/Magazine/Category/Premier_Clinic.aspx

filter by issue: All Issues
filter by category: Premier Clinic
filter by section: Country

There are some lessons on chicken picking and double stops and stuff.

Awesome. Pedal-Steel Effect that's what I want!

milo current epiphones are uh how best to put this - inconsistent. like wildly so. i would play the one that you buy. also the pickups are mediocre at best - im assuming you are looking at the fact that its a somewhat shrunken down 335 shape? if so, id look at the ibanez am73, which i think is a better guitar. feel free to hit me up with for a price quote if you are thinking of buying online anyway and i'll email you one. but go play one first!

yousendit me an artcore, jjj.

If I may offer a general newb tip for budding guitarists:

Guitar is probably the easiest instrument on which to take shortcuts, like you don't have trumpet players trying to do trills two octaves above middle C when they don't even know how to play middle C, but that's exactly what the guitar allows you to do. This is not to say you should avoid shortcuts. But devote a little time to learning, e.g., the 12 major scales in first position, the difference between a halfstep and a whole step, how scales are constructed, the intervals in a basic major chord, etc. In the long run this does so much for your ability to play inventively and to play with other people, like when you can actually build a maj7 chord and not just say "Oh Cmaj7 means my fingers go like this"

sorry should say "exactly the KIND OF THING guitar allows you to do."

^^^ exactly the kind of thing I should know by now after 17 years of playing on and off.

Yeah, I've been playing guitar longer than that and I don't think I know any of that!

the 12 major scales in first position, the difference between a halfstep and a whole step, how scales are constructed, the intervals in a basic major chord, etc

I... know all of this already? (except for precisely how first position chords for the major scales translate to guitar fingering)

Well you're a guy with a formal music background so that doesn't surprise me. But so many people just go straight to tabs and then it's like "I want to learn some blues licks" or w/e, and then dudes play these fast bendy lines that don't even go over the chords they're soloing over.

http://www.ibanez.com/HollowBodyGuitars/model-AM73B

if you dont dig the look, they do make a cosmetically tweaked version with the same specs

http://www.ibanez.com/HollowBodyGuitars/model-AM93

million xposts because i got interrupted by work

Also that was just a jumping off point and there's obviously a lot more to learn along those lines

I have a book of sheet music that is tab-free (it was written for fiddle, although I've previously gone with other C Instruments). Whenever I practice that stuff, I feel like it really improves the rest of my playing. I've done stuff like blacking out the tab on guitar sheet music too, although that isn't always helpful because there can be notation in the tab that's not in the regular transcription.

well dan you "know" those things already but are you comfortable doing them in rhythm at the drop of the hat all the time? ie can you play x scale without thinking about the fingering, while keeping your right hand picking pattern consistent, etc?

thats re: knowing the 12 major scales in first position, i know you know the other stuff - i just say this because as a dude who did violin before guitar, i knew that stuff too but the difficulty is in the translation to the fingerboard and the physicality of playing.

I mean it's important to learn fingerings too. I don't consider tab "cheating" per se, I just think it can't be the sole basis of your learning. I mean there are certain things on guitar you just can't learn from sheet music alone.

Books like Sal Salvador's Single String Studies are useful because they give you fingerings underneath staff notation, iirc.

well dan you "know" those things already but are you comfortable doing them in rhythm at the drop of the hat all the time? ie can you play x scale without thinking about the fingering, while keeping your right hand picking pattern consistent, etc?

lol of course not, I'm not a guitar savant

My point was more that the stuff Hurting was talking about is in many ways a step removed from the mechanics of playing a guitar; for example, I know instantly when I've hit a wrong note when I am running up and down through a C scale because I know how a C scale is constructed and what it is supposed to sound like.

Also I kind of explicitly said "I know what first position chords look like on paper but not how they all translate to a guitar neck"

my goal this week is to contact a teacher before my life becomes insanely busy

Ok this is going to be a sort of unhelpful post, but there's a good Ted Dunbar book that pretty much breaks down the whole fretboard in musical terms and gives you a way of learning it. I wouldn't recommend it to someone with no musical background but it's probably good for you. The problem is (1) I can't remember the name of it and (2) it's probably out of print. I will check the name when I get home though. I might even be able to scan it for you at some point.

I have a Hal Leonard book that does something very similar; it starts you out with a C scale counting down from the first string and layers in accidentals and other key signatures as it goes. Basically I used it to learn the fingerings for a C scale and have been riffing on other scales/etc since while procrastinating in getting a teacher.

Oh right, it's called "The Interrelationship of Chords, Scales and Fingerboard of Each one of the Twelve Tonalities of The Guitar"

which explains why I couldn't remember it, lol

haha no lie, that sounds like it would be exactly my type of shit

Yeah and I should say I really do mean learning the relationship between this theory stuff and the fretboard, it's just that if you don't know the theory at all you have to learn that first.

E.g. understanding that one fret up on same string = halfstep, two = wholestep, three = minor third, etc., or that the interval between any two strings at the same fret is a perfect fourth, except between the second and third strings, which is a major third, and that this applies up and down the fretboard. Internalizing this kind of stuff really helps with lead playing, forming your own chords, etc.

What about something online for music theory noobs who only really know chord shapes and anything more in depth is down to luck/trial and error? I'd love to know more about scales and theory but I'm scared???

try this, maybe? http://www.8notes.com/theory/

I haven't read it at all so I have no idea if it's terrible but it looks like it covers most of the basics you'd care to know

Guitar is probably the easiest instrument on which to take shortcuts, like you don't have trumpet players trying to do trills two octaves above middle C when they don't even know how to play middle C, but that's exactly what the guitar allows you to do. This is not to say you should avoid shortcuts. But devote a little time to learning, e.g., the 12 major scales in first position, the difference between a halfstep and a whole step, how scales are constructed, the intervals in a basic major chord, etc. In the long run this does so much for your ability to play inventively and to play with other people, like when you can actually build a maj7 chord and not just say "Oh Cmaj7 means my fingers go like this"

Trying for 2 years to make 12-year-olds understand this was no fun at all.

well dan you "know" those things already but are you comfortable doing them in rhythm at the drop of the hat all the time? ie can you play x scale without thinking about the fingering, while keeping your right hand picking pattern consistent, etc?

― Thu'um gang (jjjusten), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 11:44 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

thats re: knowing the 12 major scales in first position, i know you know the other stuff - i just say this because as a dude who did violin before guitar, i knew that stuff too but the difficulty is in the translation to the fingerboard and the physicality of playing.

― Thu'um gang (jjjusten), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 11:46 AM (9 hours ago)

Thanks, jjusten, definitely hitting you up when I save up more guitar money. Leaning toward a Reverend, I think or one of those Ibanezes.