Musical Instruments

[Jesus-BBY Community Connector]

Hello people! I’ve wanted to learn how to play guitar for a quite some time now and recently pulled the trigger on an Epiphone Les Paul and a sweet little VOX practice amp to start learning how to play. I really like the Les Paul style and sound but didn’t want to drop that kind of money on a Gibson if I don’t know how to play yet. I’ve been looking up videos on YouTube to learn some chords and downloaded an app on my iPhone that is pretty sweet. I hope that you guys/gals can give me some pointers as to where to start because I’m totally confused.

I chose to teach myself because I really don’t have time for lessons. I’ve been playing drums for a while so I think I have an edge over your average beginner. Any tips, tricks or suggestions you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

♫♪♩Rock on! ♫♪♩

[Rrrrrrr]

Best way is go to the local music store and see if they have lessons. Locally they charge on ave $15-25/half hour.

[Kyle-BBY Community Connector]

Hey Jesus buddy!

I could probably tell you this in person but I figured I would share here in case it is useful info for anyone else.

My thoughts on beginning guitar would be to learn the fingering for the basic chords however you can.  There is a plethora of resources out there on the net where you can find them.  Then search around for the tabs for some of your favorite songs and see if you can plunk them out with the chords you just learned.  It is also really good training for your ear to listen to songs and try to figure out the chords on your own.  It can be frustrating at first but the more you keep at it, the better you get without you even noticing.

Some easy songs to start with off the top of my head might be:

Help! by The Beatles

Time of your Life (Good Riddance) By Green Day

Wonderwall by Oasis

[kvn]

What are your goals in learning gutiar? Do you want to be a rock guitarist, blues guitarist, jazz guitarist, uber-metal guitarist, avant-garde guitarist? Or do you just want to play some well-known songs?

There are different paths to take to reach these goals, so it's important to know what your goals are.

[Jesus-BBY Community Connector]

That's a good question. I guess I am more into Rock and Blues. I also want to play well known songs. I've been practicing a lot and I'm diggin it. So what do you think?

Thanks,

[kvn]

Well, for rock and blues you should start learning the pentatonic forms on the neck. You can work out some basic soloing off that. As for learning popular songs, the easiest way would probably be by looking off of chord charts. Maybe get a songbook/fakebook.

[Jesus-BBY Community Connector]

kvn -

Thanks for the guidance. I will definately do that. I already purchased a songbook. I will research pentatonics....

Thanks again!

[kvn]

Here's a useful pentatonic chart:

The red dots would be the root, i.e. starting note, of the scale. So, while they show you 5 different positions, it's the same scale. It just happens to start at different places on the neck.

If you get deeper into guitar playing you can think of those different positions as seperate modes of the scale...but for now just think of it as one big scale divided up.

[Quick112]

Start with chords. Learn the basic "open" chords first then learn how to build chords and play barre chords. Don't start with scales, you wont know how to use them and if you dont understand chords and what key a song is in then you wont know how to use them. It doent matter what style you play, everyone pretty much starts the same. You have to have basic knowledge before you really try to limit yourself to a particular style. It's like college, all students take english 101 and generic math classes. They dont get separated into thier major until their junior year. Learning to play guitar is the same way. Start with open chords then barre chords, then try to learn a song then worry about learning scales. If you do this, youll have a better chance of sticking with it than just running up and down scales not knowing how to improvise

Good Luck

[Shady]

First, if you have any friends that play, learn chords from them.

Chords.  As others have said, learn the basic chords, C, E, G, A, F, D.  Learn to move easily from one to another.  Then learn the minor chords.  You can find chords and finger postioning if you do a google search.  Once you're familiar moving from chord to chord, you can start to put songs together. Llearning is half the fun!