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I want to learn guitar, and I was wondering if any of you guys had advice on where to start. Money is not a problem, and I already have a decent electric guitar. However, I don't have the time to learn from a teacher, so I wish to self-teach myself.

The best resource I've found so far is JamPlay. But before I put money into it, I wanted to confirm if this is the best choice.

Please also indicate if you are a guitar player yourself or not. This will help with my decision.

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EDITS:

Some may want to know a little more about myself so that they can type up a more helpful comment. There honestly isn't much to know however, I am not a typical genre-restrained type of person who wants to only play rock, punk, jazz, or metal. I want to be able to play everything.

Although... heh heh... I'll admit that a delicious fantasy I've had for a while is to get to the point where I can play Demetori's music.



I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but I may need your help to reach my fantasy.

Although I picked up a music class in my last year of high school, I always learned myself, simply by playing songs and looking up chords I didn't know. While a course can help you better structure your practice, generally speaking it's no different than teaching yourself all the way, since in the end all it comes down to is practice, and lots of it.

I can't give you a step by step path since I certainly didn't follow one, and anyway there's so many types of guitar playing that it is quite useless. Fundamentally though, you should know the notes on your fretboard and the basic major/minor/7th chords. After that, everything you learn will be up to what kind of music you want to play, and you'll pick it up along the way as you practice.

http://guitar.about.com/library/blguitarlessonarchive.htm this is a good place to start.

I'm a guitar player myself but I learned from a teacher so what I say might not be useful. I don't know how far you want to take it, but if time is a problem you won't go far. To learn any instrument takes time, patience, time, perseverance, and time. Most of guitar learning are monotonous repetitive exercises.

What kind of music you like? If you just want to have some fun, you can start learning how to read tablature(takes literally minutes how to read it) and look up for some classic hard rock/metal/punk stuff. They're very easy to play since it's just power-chords. It's important to try to play easy stuff you like because it's good motivation.

Teachers serve for very necessary guidance. One hour with a good guitar teacher makes wonders. However most of the training is by yourself, actual music learning is kinda unsociable. The best guitar players trained alone 8 hours per day, 7 days per week to get where they are, so yeah, time and patience. Most people give up.

Obviously learn the ABC equivalents of chords since that's how they're written. Next are chords, start with major chords D(Re); then C(Do) and finally F(Fa). The last one is a bother for most beginners. Learn at least the notes that the strings start with and the order of them. If you go through them, learn the minor chords, and after that the difficulty is memorising the many positions, since there are thousands of them, and the major and minor only take up 10 of them. There are many music abbreviations, you can learn them later with some reading.

You already have an electric guitar? Too bad, because I believe you should have gotten a very cheap acoustic guitar instead. Since they're "harder" to play, when you get to the electric guitar it will seem much easier to play it. It's better(not faster) to flex your fingers and get used to certain positions.

Last but not least, get yourself a metronome later on. Tempo is very important to music, there are many suggested solo exercises over the internet, play one or two hours for each tempo, especially the ones you have difficulty with. Do the same with chords. I am probably missing many things, but that's the gist of it.

I dropped guitar around the 1st difficulty gap. (Between able to play and chain a few chords > and play a true entire Track) I was too impatient and certainly aimed too difficult track, so being patient and not too ambitious at the beginning may help.

For what I know all the basics can be found on the internet for free. Having someone who master the instrument may be useful.

Aiming for easy self rewarding things is always more motivating.

Playing in group may be good, but may also be discouraging for people with slower learning or lower self confidence.

Start by growing a swoop and carrying around a guitar you can't even play to impress the ladies.

I don't play guitar, but I've heard youtube has some extremely useful basic tutorials. Also, maybe go searching for tabs of some basic songs that you're interested in playing, and slowly chip away at them once you have the basics down. A mix of technical practice and results based practice (playing stuff you want to play) is probably the best approach.

Good idea, but usually you can't seriously consider any action before you play something...

what i did is look up the song that i wanted to play and search that tab up for them on the internet and then play the songs so much that i memorized them

Hi.
You should start to learn the basics, it will take you between 6 month (more or less) to 1 year to master depending on the time you put in it, and from there you should be able to find what you need to progress. I must recommend a site for you : justinguitar.com. This is by my point of view the best and most usable site on the internet to learn guitar, and it is entirely free!
Beginners usually start here : Beginner's course
All you need to learn, and how to learn it is fully detailed there.
I'm just a student who also learn from him, though I already had a few years of guitar playing before I found the site.

The fact that you already have an electric is not better or worse than an acoustic, like RoCSC-006C1BST said. The instrument you start with should be the one you want to play, that is accordind to the style of music you want to play (rock, metal, blues, jazz, folk, etc..). It will not restrain you to apply what you learn on the other one after.

If you still want to try Jamplay, which is also a great resource for learning guitar, you should go to the first page of the site I mentionned, and scroll down to the paragraph "Need more lessons than you find here? try JamPlay...". You will find a voucher code to try Jamplay for free for 7 days.

Time is not a problem at all. College is starting soon, but I'm relaxed as ever. I'm tired of speaking through my mouth so much, so I would love to try to express myself differently; a guitar is a great solution.


I don't know about this, I will probably end up using both. (Hopefully).


Thank you so much for your advice. I will certainly look through everything you told me about.

Been playing guitar since I was 10, was classically taught til I was 15 and have been teaching myself since then. I can safely say that you need to take the time to learn how to read tabs and notation. I've met countless people over the years who think learning how to read music isn't so important and that you can easily learn to play the guitar just from observation and sound. That may be true for the odd genius who pops up every now and again, but not for the average person. Being able to read music and understand all the major symbols is important.

Its also best not to set the bar too high for yourself when starting out. Just grab some beginners books with simple melodies and start from there. However its also healthy to challenge yourself with tougher songs, preferably ones you like, favourites even, instead of some randomly picked song, or one which is notoriously difficult. Keep practising it and it'll really boost your esteem when you can play it with confidence. But make sure you really focus on the basics first with the odd challenge on the side, and gradually move up to more difficult songs. I also think its important to play stuff you like, and songs that you actually know.

Don't expect to become an expert over night, being able to play an instrument well comes from many hours of practice and dedication. Your finger tips will hurt quite a bit during the first few months, mine bled a bit but I was ridiculously hardcore when I was younger. Oh, and buy a capo. It can make learning new songs very easy, and once you're can play a song well with a capo, take it off and you'll find playing it without one isn't so difficult.

You should probably read up on how often you'll need to change your strings, general guitar maintenance, tuning etc. All that stuff is on the internet anyway.



If I had a penny for every guy who's done this... and then ended up being seriously embarrassed when either myself or someone else pointed out that I play guitar and then baited them to play something. Its not worth being caught out by someone who can actually play the instrument.

I'll have to second avoiding tablature. It's not a very descriptive medium, since you don't have the length of each note and has rather confusing notation at times. In the long run, learning to read sheet music and play it correctly on the guitar will save you a lot of time and help you in your understanding of music theory, which is a pretty sweet bonus.

I used to avoid using tabs for this reason, but it doesn't hurt to use it if you're well acquainted with the song. If you want to play a song you've never heard before then sheet music is the way forward, you'll know exactly how its supposed to sound whereas you'll only get a vague idea with tabs.

I don't know about others, but I don't think tablatures hinder people from learning partitures. Just beware they're very different, and use tablatures for songs you know well.

I think a capo is useless. Training the strength of your fingers is more important, just keep trying those barre chords until you're good. It doesn't really take long to get used to it.


The mention of an acoustic guitar is because when you take an electric guitar it will be easier, and there's no more proper instrument for a genre of music. Only jazz from the genres you mentioned is musical theory heavy, learning only according to some styles of music is very delimiting.

I play guitar and I don't know how to read music, I look at tabs or figure out the song myself (which is really hard) I think you should learn music theory while playing the guitar, so you can actually know what the fuck you're doing. I'm too lazy to do so, so I just read tabs and play.

True, but a capo can help with precision and helping your fingers to remember movements. Doesn't work for everyone, but its worth a shot. I'm double jointed which was rather problematic when I first started out, but using a capo really helped me nail various movements.


Very true, you'd be doing yourself a huge favour by starting on an acoustic first. But if you have no interest in acoustic guitars then its no bother.

Reading sheet music is quite easy to learn (the basic at least), definitively worth a bit of time. However I know more than descent guitarist that know nothing about solfège.

I'm also currently self learning guitar myself:P I'm also pretty new so i can't really help you, except for 1 thing is that don't give up and always try! it has a huge impact on how you learn

Capos are useful for achieving certain chords that are normally impossible without changing your tuning drastically.

"Impossible" chords which aren't necessary for beginners.
Or maybe I'm just too used to never needing capos because I don't have one so I do some voodoo and then it works.

Of course the OP is the one trying to learn, so choose whatever works best for you, if you tried and liked capos go for it.