A beginner can strum along with "Patience," sound good, and have fun doing it. Now, show me a beginner who can improvise in Lydian or Phrygian and sound halfway decent, and I'll show you a flying pig. I think focusing on the modes as a beginner will just lead to frustration. Of course they are good to learn further down the road.

Why do you think this? I don't think you give beginners enough credit, especially if guitar isn't their first instrument besides the recorder. Scales are not difficult to memorize. It's seven notes.

Memorizing the scales isn't the hard part. Using them in musical ways is the real challenge, and as I said, no beginner will be able to do that. Playing things that sound awful isn't fun; it's frustrating. And I strongly believe that maximizing fun and minimizing frustration and tedium is the best way to learn an instrument, at least for the first year or two.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. My first experience with an electric guitar was highlighted by horrible noise, and I thought it was a blast.

We're talking about beginners. I think it's important to find a short path to sounding good and being a functional guitar player. This is especially true you're young and want to get into a band. It's better to play fewer things very well than be just okay at a lot of stuff. It's so cliche to say it but it's really not about how many scales you know but what you do with them.

Being fair - it depends on what exactly you're looking to do as a guitar player. If you're a japanese kid trying to be the next soloist guitar hero guy or a jazz guy then your approach is going to change from the dude who wants to play some Radiohead stuff. In my experience playing rock/metal type things I thought the most productive use of my time (in the first couple of years) went to basic technique and learning songs. Some ear training came with learning songs, making sure I was bending to pitch and not being lazy, the critical scales and patterns, things like that. Those paid immediate and long-lasting dividends because I use them every day all the time.

Certainly jamming tons of odd scales over some cheesy E5/Bb5 pattern had benefits too. Same with writing out obnoxious arpeggios and chord substitutions & sitting there for hours on end practicing them. I started at a time where the shredder guys were in their heyday, so a lot of us came up learning that stuff. As I got older I still appreciated what incredible players like Satch or Vai can do and all, just don't really listen to or play their music.

You can always branch out later if you want to expand your horizons. For someone who just learned basic chords I'd keep the scale list short. Kid wants to play some Volbeat songs I'm not going to show him the melodic minor scale and explain why it's different ascending than is descending. I'm going to show him a couple Volbeat songs, and then see what we can do about the solo if there is one. Now if it so happens that there's a lot of phrygian tonality going on maybe we can dig into that a little more.

The other beginner tip is to go easy on the pedals. Some distortion/OD and a hint of reverb is enough. You're not doing yourself any favors drowning out mistakes in chorus and delay, or going Kirk Hammett with the wah either.

You guys are probably better musicians than me, but I think your advice stifles creativity. We should be encouraging creativity. Take it easy on the pedals? Nah. Don't improvise with different scales because it's not going to sound good? Nah. If someone wants to be in a band asap, then sure, they should practice the things that will get them there the fastest. Most of the rest of us though, we play for fun, and I encourage players to have fun with their instruments, as horrible as that may sound.

Look, if you want to be a creative writer, you must have a good foundation in using the English language in order to express yourself creatively. The same applies to music or any other art form.

Yeah I acknowledged that if you want to be in a band asap, then you should practice the things that will get you there the fastest. Besides that, I disagree with you. You can write a story, compose a song, draw a picture, or whatever you want to do, all without a solid foundation. People won't necessarily enjoy it, but the artist will enjoy it. That's what art should be about. It shouldn't be about whether or not I like your music, drawings, or stories. It should be about the artist, and the satisfaction that comes from creating things. You have it backwards.

Hey beginners,

Be creative. Have fun, and never ever ever apologize for your art.

I agree with this. But the best way to do this is to learn the fundamentals first.

Thinking about getting Rocksmith as a teaching aid, too. Would definitely still continue studying theory along with it, though. Just seems like it's a great way to keep the guitar in your hands.

My favorite part of practice was playing along with albums. Today with a little software you can loop certain parts you want to work on, slow them down while keeping pitch. Just so many easy/great tools to learn from. I used to have to rewind cassettes on a boom box lol. I had to make copies of anything I wanted to work on as eventually my player would eat the tape (and it was about half a pitch slow at that).

Just make sure you save some time for actual playing. Once I figured that out I'd practice for about 45 minutes a day and then do whatever. Far less now with a grownup schedule LDO but imo that was plenty enough to improve your technique and still learn the things you want. I had a really long phase before that where I had all these exercises and scales solid but only knew parts of 50 songs.

Those guitar magazine articles Steve Vai has about his 10-hour regimen really set me up for failure. I don't know how I kept at it. At one point I was transcribing Hanon piano exercises to guitar. It's more boring than it sounds. My right hand was beasting though, but still.

My friend that I jam with who's only been playing ~6 months now is getting a lot better. I think playing in a band setting is helping him improve a lot.

Sage advice here:

very nice. def solid advice

Got Rocksmith in the mail today. Downloading now. Will post my thoughts tomorrow after I play (probably all day).

I didn't play a lot, but I did play.
First thing that became readily apparent was that what little playing ability I have goes to absolute **** when I can't look at the guitar. I think the game will be great for helping me learn to navigate the neck without looking at my fingers.

We'll have to see how the game progresses. Haven't had to play any chords yet or anything.

The thing about Rocksmith is you have to learn a new way to read tab that's based on colors. Also I'd suggest switching to inverted in options. For some reason they have the Low E string set furthest away by default.

The thing I like most about Rocksmith is it helps you develop endurance. When you start out playing you might just learn some recognizable riffs, Rocksmith has you playing through full songs.

Yeah the color thing is kind of odd but I'm not sure how else they could do it. I inverted the tab first thing after the sound check. It was one of the common complaints I'd read about when doing my research deciding whether or not to buy the game.

Gonso (or anyone), do you have any experience with midi guitar? I remember years ago when I tried it, the latency was awful. I've read quite a bit about different setups of varying complexity and cost, but not sure any of them really kill off the latency (other than Synthaxe which are old and cost infinite). The ZTar instruments seem more like keyboards transformed into a guitar neck.

There's Variax and all that but midi is pretty dead to me personally at this point. If you want to tool around with that I'd stick to a good normal guitar, and then do the sound modeling afterwards. Axe Fx 2 is a beast and before long you'll have tons of products that awesome for a lot less money.

AxeFx is awesome but I specifically wanted something to trigger some midi synths and samples to lay down parts for electronic. The problem is I am just way more proficient on guitar than keyboard. Starr Labs instruments are probably not as unnatural as I think, but they are also ridiculously expensive unfortunately.

Rocksmith is definitely challenging. I think I sometimes I need to stop and really master the songs they throw at me instead of just continuing with the story.

i basically just unlocked the effects pedals i wanted to be able to play with in the amp section, then stopped playing the journey portion of the game. i just level the songs i want to learn to play then master them.

i don't know much about effects and pedals, so when i played it, i didn't mess around with those much. looked like a cool part of the game too.