So, as posted years ago, I have been thinking about guitar.
Actually, in the past 5 years, I've been learning guitar and playing. I play occasionally with some friends, mostly just noodling on my own. I've got serious in the past maybe two years.
I still suck but every month I suck less.
When I started, I could only make noise. But pretty soon I was making noise that had some musical quality. And pretty soon after that my wife would ask "isn't that Twist and Shout"? And sometimes the song she mentioned was the song I was trying to play!
I have not had lessons, except for a handful of group classes at
Gryphon Strings in Palo Alto, from
Carol McComb. Carol is great. I have met many casual folkies who have taken classes with Carol.
I've mostly done stuff on my own through a combination of
Let me give some thoughts and opinions on what I've seen and make some light recommendations. I'm not an expert but have had some experience, perhaps it can be of help.
First, whatever else you are doing, remember this (I'll repeat again I'm sure)
Try to do it perfectly even if slowly.
Make good sounds happen. Your fingers will learn how to make things sound right if that's what you are practicing. They will learn to make buzzes and mutes and other crappy sounds if THAT is what you are practicing. Make it sound right, THEN speed up. If you are pushing tempo and playing garbage, you will learn to play garbage and it's hard to unlearn.
Music is made from building blocks. There are "chunks" that if you master, will help pick up new tunes. These are not simply notes and chords. Sequences are important. You will find the same kind of sequences over and over. Once you get to moveable chords, especially the basic barre forms, and can play arpeggios on everything, you are a guitar god! Or at least minor deity.
So we find out that there is a reason certain things get taught and you should learn them. This suggests using one of the structured lesson programs, like Justin guitar, even if you like Rocksmith, or just learning individual songs. It's a good thing to learn some songs! I'd recommend learning the E, D and A chords, with which you can play a lot of things. They are not terribly hard, although I still have some problems getting the A to ring out perfectly when switching. Just can't squeeze all my stubby fingers into exactly the right place every time...
Rocksmith
So, the second approach I took was buying Rocksmith 2014 for myself for Xmas, 2013. Great great choice. It gets
great reviews. Rocksmith is gamified instruction. Looks like Guitar Hero, but you plug in a real instrument (either electric or an acoustic with a pickup; I have each. I find the program doesn't pick up the acoustic as well and quite often I get frustrated because I know I'm playing right yet the program is scoring it as a miss. So I use the strat). There are a lot of parts to the program. "Learn a Song" takes you through a song. The structure is that there are levels of difficulty, very fine grained. As you play, the program scores you and will nudge up the difficulty when you are playing well (or make it easier if you are not). Play through, get a score, crowd cheers or whatever. One of the finer aspects, though, is that inside the song you can interrupt to get to the "riff repeater" practice mode. This is mostly what I do. You can set some parameters and work on a subset of the song at slower tempo.
The other really really cool bit in Rocksmith is the user community. There is a lot of content available from Ubisoft for a price & I've bought a lot of it. However, the file formats are known and you can hack your own song.
CustomsForge has thousands of user contributed songs, some of which are garbage but many of which are great. I like surf tunes, and bought the Surf Pack, but that only has Misirlou, Walk Don't Run and Wipeout. Quite a few others exist on customs forge like at least two Pipelines. Sleepwalk by Santo & Johnny, AND by Hank Marvin and the Shadows.
Learn and Master Guitar
This set is not cheap. Lists for $249. It's occasionally available on sale but I think I paid $149 for it.
There are some additional lessons available for e.g. genre specific things which I haven't purchased.
It contains perhaps 50 hours worth of instruction & practice tracks. More like 20 hours of instruction with a lot of exercises, play-alongs and "workshops".
The structure of the course is excellent, and the instruction is pretty clear. There are some books to go along with the DVDs.
I do think that some modules are too long and that a student benefits from working on smaller chunks more frequently. However, this set is a go-to for working on specific things now. The barre chord modules and exercises are really good. I finally can do that stupid F# that's in a couple of songs I've been trying to play. And after seeing the Beach Boys, I needed to learn Kokomo. It's got some less common chords and mildly challenging rhythm but turned out to be easy since Steve Krenz showed me the barre shapes for minor7.
CAGED
You may run across some guys who want to teach you the "CAGED" system. It's fine, it's not magic. There are a lot of nice tunes that don't use anything except open chords, so why not?
Well, some folks think it's
counterproductive
Justin Guitar
This site is quite good. Justin has a boatload of YouTubes and on his site has them organized into lessons. The practice routines are very valuable. It's pretty much all free - he does upsell some books & DVDs etc but it's all gentle. This is the best first instructional site because the lessons are good and it is free. You can work with it and decide how your learning should progress, without spending money on other stuff.
Practicing well
But learning anything takes practice, and learning to get better and do something well takes
disciplined and "
deliberate practice". That means (a) you need to do it and (b) you need a method to immediately provide corrections and guidance.
See, e.g.
http://j2jenkins.com/2012/02/10/how-i-practice-deliberately-on-guitar/
http://j2jenkins.com/2013/03/25/my-daily-guitar-practice-routine/
http://j2jenkins.com/2013/07/01/300-hours-of-deliberate-practice-on-guitar/
http://cochranemusic.com/guitar-deliberate-practice
What to practice
InfoBarrel Guide to learning guitar
List of exercises - Music Discipline:
Free site with play along exercises, metronome control. If you register, you get a better set of exercises. Interesting concept, you enter the number of minutes you have to practice and the site feeds you a set of exercises to make up that time. I go here for 10 minutes two or three times a day.
FingerTrainer
I have only seen the ad for it...
If you join Guitar Tricks, they have a lot of
suggested practice routines
Yousician
A fairly new app, which detects what you are playing and provides immediate feedback. There is a free version which limits what you can do (but you can do a lot!) and a subscription version with more behind it. I've got it, played it a little bit. I hook up my strat to the ipad with the Apogee JamPlay device. It detects my playing pretty well, tells me if I'm early or late. Different view than the RockSmith / Guitar hero view of notes coming towards you. But not that different - they are just moving right to left with a bouncing ball marking the tempo.
I have basic chords and most open chords under control. I sort of understand barre chords and the shapes for major, minor, seventh and something else I forget the name of.
I do not understand strum patterns nor travis picking but have been exposed to them. Right now, just getting the chords pretty much in the right order at the right tempo is all I can hope for. But using the thumb for bass notes and strumming with e.g. alternate bass is next on the list.
Other stuff
There are a ton of guitar lessons online, most on YouTube though there are many sites that control the content. The quality really varies. Anyone with a webcam can make up a lesson and post it. I have not gone through the entire set of intertubes but have seen a lot, and wasted a lot of time. In no real order, here are some you might want to check out.
Free guitar lessons A lot of free lessons. They want to upsell you eventually to their DVD and online course "The Guitar system"
GuitarLessons365 I found this site when I decided I wanted to learn John Fogerty's Centerfield. They have a nice YouTube. I still can't do the bended chords but otherwise I can play it through just fine. Classic opening riff followed by pretty simple chord sequences. It's one of my go-to songs if we are sitting around and somebody says, "hey Dave, how's your guitar coming along? play us something". Most of the time, one song is enough for everyone to agree they have had enough, but if I start with this one, I get a second chance. I also found a nice Margaritaville. It can be played as a very easy song, or you can get fancy and do all the stuff Jimmy Buffett does in between the second and third verses.
There is a lot of free stuff here, and like everyone else, they would like to upsell you to premium content.
Martyzsongs May or may not be your style of instruction. He takes thing pretty slow and I think in general is quite clear. Some of his YouTubes are wordier than necessary but overall you can probably get some good lessons and practice.
Guitar Habits Not really that much about habits, and when he is, it's wordy and not really on point.
Guitar blogger, who posts some lessons. Many posts are low content, quite a few just motivational platitudes, but some are pretty interesting and I go here now and then to scan the lessons.
Andrew Wasson
He's got some great lessons. Some free stuff, can pay for the good stuff. He has a lot of great info on theory, which helped me figure out the point of some progressions, as well as helping understand how to move a song to a different key.
FretJam is not really for beginners, but at the intermediate level, he shows a lot about learning various scales. You can learn a lot about music theory here as well.
Subscription teaching sites
For more professional instruction than just the random guy with a webcam, you might want to look at
Artist Works
I'm tempted. They have a subscription model with various pricing based on length of commitment. $35/month monthly, $20/month annual subscription. Awesome musicians. Howard Levy for harmonica, Tony Trischka for banjo, Mike Marshall for mandolin...
For guitar, there are several teachers, covering fingerstyle, bluegrass flatpicking, classical, rock (Paul Gilbert!!). I looked through Martin Gilbert's free lesson on fingerstyle jazz. I love that sound and might sign up. But, it's $$$ committed. Much cheaper than just regular lessons from your neighborhood teacher, though.
Jam Play and
Guitar Tricks are similar with subscriptions available at various pricing. Cheaper than Artist works. They have a handful of free "teaser" lessons to show off what you see. Mostly you see variations on some teacher demonstrating stuff.
Coursera has a beginning guitar class from Berklee School of Music.
Tabs etc
Ultimate Guitar and the app
Songsterr
Guitar Pro will play the tab, you can adjust speed etc. Great practice tool. The higher end My Songbook tabs are too pricey in my opinion, but there are a lot of free tabs, and it appears that there is a big user community, and it's not hard to make guitar pro files that you can upload and use in the system. Pretty good tool to go along with your other stuff to work on specific songs.
OnSong is a great app to hold a bunch of songs, can make playlists, can easily change keys, and it will scroll through the song at your speed. This seems to be hugely popular in the "worship" guitar community, but us atheist jammers can use it too.
Amazing Slow Downer
slows down the tempo without screwing up pitch! Put in your own mp3 or whatever and play along at the speed that works for you to be able to get it right. It's a pretty old program but does what it does well.
RiffMaster Pro
Like the above, get it on your iOS device and play along with your own music, slowing down to the tempo that suits you.
Songbooks, singing groups
My friend Pablo has been hosting approximately monthly for years - it's a great gathering and there are many more around the country. In Carmel, there is a ukulele group and a "sing for supper" group.
In the 60's we might have called it a hootenanny.
There are three huge compilations of songs with idiosyncratic music. Pete Seeger pretty much launched it with a view towards encouraging just getting together to sing stuff.
Enthusiasm counts for more than skill.
We use these three books, totalling maybe 2500 songs (!!!)
Rise Up Singing and the new
Rise Again
Gunther Anderson
most important lessons I've learned
In case you skipped this above, slow and correct is right. ALWAYS work on getting the sound perfect before trying for speed. That is the core complaint I have with basic Rocksmith "learn a song". It feeds simplified versions of songs at full speed. However, where rocksmith really shines in this area is the use of the "riff repeater", where you can run through a portion (or all) of a song at the speed and difficulty of your choosing. With normal settings, RR will take you through the riff and score you. With a low enough error rate, it will speed up. I like to set it to a very low tolerance so it won't pass me if I am playing crap. Typically I find that day 1, I struggle with the piece and continue to make mistakes for perhaps 4-5 playthroughs. Then, seemingly from nowhere, I "get it" and run through it perfectly. It will speed me up and generally I can go straight to about 90% before making mistakes. Going from 90% speed to 100% speed is really hard. I'll put it down at this point and pick up the next day. Now, I have mastery in maybe another 15-30 minutes. Way cool. If I want to master a song, I can do it in about a week, with maybe an hour a day on Rocksmith. ("Master" to my level of satisfaction - I am still at beginner to intermediate on pretty much everything)
How would I start today?
- Justin guitar,
- Music exercises and
- Yousician, for maybe 6 months to a year. All FREE.
Then I'd buy Rocksmith and start racking up some scores, playing some things for fun, working on some specific songs.
Oh, a metronome is really helpful. Set it slow and keep the tempo. Speed it up as you do something perfectly. Rocksmith Riff Repeater will do it for you... but it's not a metronome. Guitar Pro has a nice synthetic metronome, I'm sure there are others.
This should get you to a decent plateau. To progress more, you will probably need a real teacher, or one of the subscription lesson sites, or good discipline to put together more practice sessions beyond what MusicExercises gives you.
Buy some songbooks and learn stuff you like.
Meet up with a bunch of people and sing with the Rise Up Singing books. Make music, have fun!
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