Advice from a guitar semi-newbie to any others on this board wanting to learn.

I’d say with the wealth of resources available today, moving into theory can actually be a temptation that you go into too early before the practical/physical guitar skills truly develop. I’m 21 and gen Z has almost too many resources starting out. If you look up how to play Seven Nation Army on YouTube, you’ll get bombarded by videos telling you that you need to know every scale and how to use them to be a “good guitarist”. It can lead to a lot of useless practice/burn out for those who can’t readily see what videos are meant for beginners vs advanced players.

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Hire a teacher

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When I move to Naples at the end of the month I'm going to spend a lot more time working on my guitar skills and getting am instructor is the first thing I want to do. Great advice and thank you!

I just riff over A minor pentatonic when people ask me to play guitar

For me, I think the most important thing to do is just make time to play. Even if you don't feel like you're learning or improving, it's relaxing to strum a six string.

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What's a going rate for a decent guitar teacher?

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I've got a group of older people(all in their 70s) that I teach for free once a week. I think locally, some teachers charge $30 per 1/2 hour lesson.

Scales and theory are how you get good, but a beginner isn’t at the stage where they can really take advantage of that yet. Beginners need to focus on the basics first:
1. Reading tabs
2. Fretting
3. Strumming
4. Bar chords
5. Quickly changing between chord shapes to develop muscle memory
6. Strumming along with simple 3 and 4 chord songs
7. Palm muting
8. And learning simple blues progressions in E and A

Once they’ve got that down, I would start moving on to scales (starting with blues pentatonic, then major and minor), then box method, then basic music theory (major/minor progressions, 1-5-7 songs, 4 chord songs, verse/chorus structure, etc).

Once they’ve got their hands dirty on that, I would move on to bends, alternative tunings, vibrato, finger picking, taps, pinch harmonics, etc. If they were an electric player, I’d start educating them on effects and amplification.

Next would be modes (dorion, ionian, etc), then finally more advanced techniques that I haven’t really mastered like chicken picking, slide guitar, sweep picking, and more advanced song writing

That first phase, especially bar chords and fretting is the hardest and most painful stage, but if someone can pull through that, it gets much much more fun.

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they don't have much time left to catch on

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brutal

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1. Reading tabs

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This right here is why I never mastered the guitar. I hate learning songs from tabs/sheet music. Feels like I'm moving a millimeter per hour.

Wish there was a better way other than learning from YouTube videos or working it out by ear.

The best way is with sheet music, but the problem with sheet music is it tells you what notes to play and when, but not how on the guitar to play them. Tabs teach you how to play the note, but not what the note is or when to play it. Tabs are an excellent tool for learning while listening to a song, so you can learn how the player you’re listening to played those notes.

On the flip side, sheet music is great, but requires the reader to come up with their own method of arriving at those notes at the time they’re supposed to be played.

Much like capitalism, when it comes to learning guitar parts, tabs are the slowest method, except for all others.

I learn most songs by a combination of tabs and by ear, but my ear was trained by tons of knowledge of music theory and two decades of playoffs in ensembles, marching bands, jazz groups, etc. I know what sounds right, I know the influences a lot of artists are pulling from, I know a lot of the patterns routinely employed to write songs, so it’s easy for me to pick up simple stuff. I might not be an advanced technical player, but I know how to find the notes that will sound right.

Remember, though, that there are two different modes of musicianship: the interpretive and the creative. The interpretive musician seeks first to master the techniques of others in order to play what has already been played before putting their own spin on it. They seek to interpret the tabs and sheet music to be able to precisely mimic and replicate the exact technique’s employed. The creative musician merely uses the works of others to add to their bag of tricks. They might read the tab, but come up with a completely different way of arriving at the same notes, thus utilizing a novel technique with their own spin.