(hope this is the right forum for this)

i'm looking to pick up the guitar and learn to play. do any of you have any recommendations for books, dvd's or websites that would be a good starting point? i have a friend who's going to help me pick out a good acoustic guitar to buy.

any help is appreciated.

when you're learning chords, chordfind.com is a good site to learn how to play pretty much every chord known to man. I would also recommend buying an uber-cheap guitar to start off with, then if you decide to get serious, invest in a quality instrument. There's no sense in spending several hundred dollars on a starter guitar, especially if you quit within a 6 months.

the absolute best begginers approach is to focus on rhythm training by doing different strums in time with your right hand. a metronome can be had for under $15 and will help with your right hand training.

do not worry about trying to learn fancy chords at first. do not attempt to learn Stairway to Heaven. this will result in deadends, lacking in music fundamentals, frustration, and probably a short guitar playing interest.

you can attempt a beginner's primer video, but even those might be too complicated.

http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Play-Acousti...9874&sr=1-1

any other questions, let me know.

The "Stairway to Heaven" comment is a great point. Learn to actually play the guitar before you start learning to play songs. There is a difference. I have met so many people who can play tons of songs note for note, but can't just pick up the guitar and play in a free for fall jam session. It's because they don't really know what they are playing; the songs are just a collection of notes to them. Don't be that person.

I'm that person. I've been playing guitar for three years. How do I fix me?

I'm not much of a teacher, but I have few ideas. Learning music theory would be a good place to start. And not just chords and scales; learn what makes them up,how they work, and how the two work together. Someone else mentioned learning rhythm patterns with a metronome. Great suggestion. Same thing when practicing scales. You'll be amazed how much easier it is to learn and play other people's music when you understand music theory; the pieces "make sense", so to speak.

I hear this guy's good.

I'm also a beginner, have gotten several beginner type books and am also taking lessons. Here are my thoughts:

* Uncle Tim. His strategy is to learn major scales and the chords that go with them. Basically, you spend you're entire first year doing just those scales. You spend 1/3 of your time doing scales, 1/3 doing chords, 1/3 playing songs. I'll go along with Sloth and say that playing songs isn't optimal compared to learning the chords and scales.

* Steve Vai. Nice article in a very recent Guitar World. He says you should spend 1/3 of your time doing finger exercises (including scales and pure finger exercises), 1/3 doing chords, 1/3 doing songs.

* Guitar Principles. Her thing is that too many people start with chords, scales, etc. without learning proper technique first. So their bad techniques become ingrained. So her books emphasize doing everything correctly first. You're supposed to play VERY slowly when learning scales and chords and do so without any tension. Her books don't really teach the scales and chords and are meant as an accompaniment to them--i.e., her books teach you how to practice, not what to practice. But they make good points. One of the exercises is to take a metronome set fairly slowly and switch between two chords. Surprisingly, even though I thought I had mastered the transition, I really hadn't. I really have to go in depth with this method though. I've only been glossing through it.

* Troy Stetina's metal method. I have the Lead Guitar Primer and the Rhythm method. The Lead Guitar primer teaches you the A-minor pentatonic scale and some licks. That's it. The Rhythm guitar book teaches power chords. That's it. Sounds like I'm knocking the books? No. Really, if you want to play metal, that's what you should learn first, because pentatonics and power chords form the basis for much of metal.

* Lessons. My first teacher was really haphazard. He would choose random songs for me to learn and teach me chords as they became necessary. He also didn't listen to me. Naturally, I ended up quitting him. My new teacher is a much better listener and knows that I want to learn the basics first. So he is going through all sorts of styles and teaching me lots of different chords. The problem is that, being advanced himself, he expects me to learn stuff faster than I am capable of doing. But he does listen to me and slows down when I ask.

What I am currently doing is basically the Vai method. I spend my primary time doing finger exercises, then I do the chords, both the ones I know and the ones my teacher is showing me.

The key is practice. When I first started, I was making huge progress because I would practice 2-3 hours per week. Now that I've started a new job, I'm lucky to practice 1 hour/week. If I just applied myself, I'd be progressing much faster.

to be proficient at the instrument you need to know: different strumming patterns, different time signatures, corresponding chords in keys, pentatonic scale

right hand technique (rhythm) is much more important than left hand technique to learning the foundations of music.

it's extremely hard to teach yourself. i've reached many small plateaus and always find myself frustrated by limitations also. the absolute best way to learn is to have a teacher or experienced friend give you lessons. otherwise you'll probably need to invest in videos and books, which are extremely abundant. you might be able to find a few learning resources on youtube if you look hard enough also.

This guy has some great online beginner to intermediate lessons. Learn your scales the way he teaches.

When buying an acoustic the most important thing for a beginner is that the strings are not too high off the fretboard, making it difficult to play. This is the case with many beginner ultra-cheap guitars. There is little to lose by going for something like the Seagull S6, it will retain a lot of its value for resale if you don't end up using it and it plays very sweet.

WORST GUITAR EVER!!! These guitars suck and turn more people off of guitar.

I disagree. Don't spend a fortune, but know playing uber-cheap guitars sucks and might actually frustrate you enough to make you quit.

^This is true, but in general, as a beginner you need not spend more than $200 on a guitar/beginner package, until you are sure you will stick with it.

Go to www.guitarnoise.com and post questions in the forum there, great community there that I have been a part of for 4 years now.

One of the things I like to do is just lay down some rhythm tracks and then just play over top of them trying out different things.

I bought a series of beginner books to learn scales and technique and then started learning songs. Go to music forums. I used to go to harmony central. Not sure if it's still good or not, but check it out.

def get something between $100-200. Perfect starter price and quality is usually decent on instruments in that price range. Having a junk instrument is not a good motivator to want to play. I would know. I had a junk six string for 5 years before i bought an epiphone SG at 14. That SG was my birth as a musician. Quality matters in the beginning!

As for playing: get into a mindset that you must play everyday for a decent amount of time. An hour a day is likely enough to get the basics. When i got into it seriously, i was playing for 2-3 hours a day, every day, 363 days a year prolly, for 2 years. Just learn to love practicing.

Good luck

Not good for real beginning beginners, but at the moment you are getting the hang of it and would like to venture in trying to play known songs, and just have general help with playing, I can highly recommend Guitar Pro. My wife managed to play a couple of songs after a few months of practicing, she had no previous experience.

So, first try and focus on the technique of guitar playing (the comment by Dave is the best advice in this thread for that matter), if you want to start playing around, guitar pro seriously kicks behind.

Have fun!!

1)Learn Tab

2)Go to olga.net, learn then play crappy Jack Johnson song at party

3)Bring your waders to the poonswamp that follows

This is the way I learned (I'm completely self-taught).
First, be freaking motivated. I REALLY wanted to learn Hendrix and Zeppelin and nothing was going to stop me. But fortunately, I also wanted to learn to play Ramones songs. Naturally, that's where I started although I learned bits and pieces of other, more complex songs along the way.

Learn at least some basic music theory. Know what A through G means. Learn what sharp, flat, major, minor mean. Learn the names of your strings.

I think that learning chords is one of the first things you should do.

Learn the open C, G, D, A, E chords. With practice, you'll be able to switch between chords much more easily. But you have to practice it. Once you can play those in succession, you've just learned to play "Hey Joe". You've also learned how to play a portion of "A Day In The Life".

Learn to play power chords. Many Ramones and Who songs are power chords based. These are actually much easier to play than the above open chords.

Learn barre chords, both major and minor. This, in my opinion, is a major stepping stone. You can play almost any song's rhythm portion with barre chords.

Along the way, you'll develop calluses. You have to because your fingers will likely be torn up and even bleed initially. But it will get better.

Simultaneously, learn strumming technique. Initially, all downstrokes will be acceptable but eventually you will have to learn to alternate with various rhythms and such. I don't know how to teach that except that it just comes with diligence and learning to play songs. Just be fluid with the right hand, no need to squeeze the water out of a guitar pick with a death grip.

As for soloing and such, I don't have much advice except much of my playing is based on pentatonic scales and blues licks. There are other scales out there, but I'm not a music theorist and can't really give you more info about that. But once you improvise with this foundation, you'll sound pretty good in most cases.

Oh, and learn tablature to help you learn some songs. It's great to jam but I don't think people try to learn guitar primarily to jam (at least at the outset). Make it a goal to learn those songs that you've wanted to play, no matter how impossible (except for Dragonforce).

I wish I had taken lessons 15 years ago when I started tooling around with a guitar. I can make up some rockin' [censored] and play along to real songs, but it's all monkey see monkey do.

Hell I just discovered minor sevenths and they blew my mind.

As for soloing I have been in a pentatonic prison for ten years.

I still dig messing around but I feel like with my decent mechanics and rhythm, I could be light years ahead of where I am now. Get lessons and understand music. Don't reinvent the wheel.

QFT b/c I just saw this thread. Buy a good quality (not top notch) used guitar that looks like hell but plays like honey. If you're smart about it you can get one for <$300 and if you give up or upgrade later you can sell it for almost what you paid, or even make a profit.

One word: craigslist

Got a $500 electric accoustic for $300 w/ a hardshell case.

I'm getting a perma-loan guitar from my dad, at my request. He used to play a lot in church, and I would like to learn to play hymns like that, along with some Johnny Cash, etc. I don't have aspirations to play contemporary rock band songs (Led Zep, Smashing pumpkins, any of that; i won't say that playing them someday won't be nice, but i envision strumming chords to Amazing Grace when I think of myself playing acoustic)

I played the piano for nearly a decade, and the trumpet for 7 years (in addition to the usual school band/ marching band fare, played in the high school jazz band w/ trumpet for 5 of those years)

Does
http://www.amazon.com/Hal-Leonard-Gu...8117426&sr=1-1
look decent for this sort of thing?

I wish I'd gotten interested in more stuff when I was younger, I could have gotten exactly what I wanted from my father, ldo.

You have the muscle memory to play the guitar. All you need is some music theory.

Take piano lessons. It worked for me.

Learn a simple song. Anything by the beatles is good.

Learn more of them. Start learning slightly more difficult tunes.

Learn scales/modes/theory

In that order, screw books/software. For beginners all you need is the internet. Once you start learning advanced technical/improvisational stuff, books are good. But a teacher is better once you get to that level. Dont waste money on a teacher when youre starting out.