I started playing out of the blue one day not too long after my Grandmother passed away, in august it will be two years. I had never played, never thought about playing ANY instrument. But all of a sudden I had the urge to play the guitar so I went to GC and got a Takamine acoustic. Then I was not satisfied and had to get the '08 MIM Strat & I have been at it everyday since then. I am 37 so no spring chicken but still some spring left. Just this week I posted myself on youtube because I am serious about this and wanted some feedback.....http://www.youtube.com/user/MrToliverLyons

It's been the most fun hard work I have ever done

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Your Fender HSS Standard Stratocaster in Electron Blue was made at the Fender Ensenada Plant in Mexico in the Year: 2008.
Final Assembly Date: July 30th, 2008
Model Number: 013 4700 587
Serial # MZ8031252

well easy in that all i wanted to do was play play play
i didn't really care about tone or anything but making notes

but hard in a way cause i started caring about what i was doing later on & you know how we all get stuck on a plateau, so to speak, and it seems like you're on it forever, then suddenly one day you wake up and start playing and you level up - you can suddenly play what you couldn't pull off before-haha
but of course that seems to keep happening as long as you keep playing i think, at least for me - but i guess it's good, y-know

I had to work at it, but you know what?

When I was teaching the students who seemed to come by it naturally had more trouble when they found something they struggled with--and they were more likely to give up on that thing and stick with what they were naturally good at.

Not all of them, but a lot of them

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It wasn't Willy-Nilly, it was at crows.

Lol - I'm motivated but I don't think the plastic flute I played in the 3rd grade has helped me much.


I get my fourth lesson today but most of my "training" has come online from justinguitar.com. One of the things he stresses is to practice what you CAN'T do rather than what you can. Always made good sense to me so that's what I try to do. (It IS hard to avoid the stuff you can do though as a beginner - hey, those are accomplishments!)

Other newbies out there - I highly recommend justinguitar.com. Seems to be a great guy - full, structured lessons - all for free. (but donate like I have if you use his site - well worth it)


Improvise? Man, if only I could! I've heard it before that improvising is a great way to learn but what if you don't know enough to improvise? Just randomly pluck strings within the scale to find what sounds good? I do know several scales but I don't seem to be getting any faster or more adept - I'm confident it will come, though.


If you say so. I still struggle with some of the chord changes, and I have a long, long way to go with rhythm patterns. This is still a foreign language to me (but I'm getting there).


I like Buddy Holly too - but Elvis got waaay more girls. (Even at 11 yrs old that was important to me, lol. I also think he had one of the best voices of all time.)

Thanks again for the replies, everyone!

-phil

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Then again, what do I know ... I've only been playin' for 6 months ... !

Not sure if this was a serious question or not but cliches become cliches for a reason - I think they're interesting. For instance, did you ever wonder why "kicked the bucket" is another way of saying, "died"?. It came about because back in the old days when capital punishment meant hanging, they often stood the person on a bucket with the rope around the neck. Execution came when the hang man literally ... kicked the bucket out from under the person.

Never really researched "piece of cake" before, but found that it has nothing to do with actually making the cake - it's this:

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~zk32/clicheorigin.html

We now return you to our regularly scheduled program about why I suck at guitar.

-phil

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Then again, what do I know ... I've only been playin' for 6 months ... !

well, when i first started out it was hard. I didnt get anything, tried to play songs, failed at it, but then i kept practicing everyday and eventually got the hang of it, 5 years later i started a band with some guys and could suddenly play a Led Zeppelin song. So you know practice makes perfect. But beginning was hell, i wouldve played longer but i put it down for years until '04 (i started originally in '99 but picked it up again at 12) so then i got motivated and picked it up, had one more guitar teacher, he got bogged down with college work, from then on i self taught myself

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I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk...

Hard. Still.

I'm hitting a road block of sorts. I have gotten pretty good with the open chords and am having a great time picking away in my own style. But now I'm working with barre chords and an injury I received last September in a motorcycle accident is rearing it's ugly head. On initial impact I had the handlebars wrenched from my grip and my left thumb was torn back toward my elbow. It's a condition they call "Game Keepers Thumb" or "Skiers Thumb". It takes about two years to fully recover from it.

Now I'm finding the barre chords very hard to do for any extended time period without a good deal of pain. This really has me bummed. I guess I'll just have to wait it out and keep enjoying doing what I can do. Maybe... just move along and practice more scales and perfect those open chords.

Cool, Thanks. I was kinda serious, now it makes sense.

Learning was no piece of cake, but I did notice others struggle harder than I did. That' doesn't necessarily make it easy, though.

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"Persistence Is The Father Of Invention"
-Crazy Old Man In Training

Don't worry about chords and keys just yet. Find a drum machine (either online or if you have a Mac you can use garage band) and just play along with the drums. Pick any scale and play around with it, slide notes, bend notes, do hammer ons and pull offs, whatever. You don't even have to know what key you're in to do that. And since you're playing with drums you'll develop better rhythm than if you were just learning licks and wanking by yourself.

At first it'll sound terrible, but you'll have fun doing it and the more you do it the better you're going to get until it's not terrible anymore. So when it comes time to worry about the key and the chords you'll be playing over, it'll be easier for you since you already know a thing or two about improvising.

I was self taught for my first year, and that's what I did right off the bat because I wanted to play lead, not the stupid chords everyone was trying to teach me. And while it turns out chords and rhythm aren't nearly as stupid as I thought they were, I'm glad that I dove right into improvising even if it took me a couple of years before I was comfortable doing it in public.

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