re: Official: Guitar beginners question and answer thread.

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It seems I have my good days and I have my bad days

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Heard Norman Blake say he can tell when he's taken a week off.... and not near the same.

Norman !!!!!

Let's me know I don't have a chance without keeping it pretty routine.

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#3 Walking the fretboard. Get your fingers walking. Start on the low E string, first fret and start walking up and down the neck as you pluck the string using down strokes or alternate picking. All 4 fingers should be involved, 1,2,3,4 shift down a fret and repeat until you reach the end of the string. Now, reverse back up the neck, 4,3,2,1 until you get back to the starting position. Drop down a string and repeat.

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This is the way.

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Thanks to this thread, I just wrote my first song in about 13 years. Only took a few days.

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Let's hear it

Make an account on sound cloud with a fake name, Like a band name or something. Use your TD handle.

So how long until I stop sounding like hot garbage? My poor wife. She's very kind and doesn't say anything as I strangle cats in the other room.

I'm mostly joking. I know I'm only two months in to learning, so I'm trying to keep my expectations realistic. My desire is more than my skill, so that keeps me coming back to try and get better. I'm about done with this intro course. I'm still a little sloppy with some things, so I'm not moving on to the next lessons until I can clean up my rhythm with chord changes. I can do one or the other, but combining the two is proving a tough nut to crack. Lord help me if I try and throw in a more-than-elementary strumming pattern.

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lessons until I can clean up my rhythm with chord changes. I can do one or the other, but combining the two is proving a tough nut to crack.

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You probably know this, but slow down. Use a metronome and only go as fast as you can without messing up. Then slowly increase the BPM. It also will help you to count the beats out loud.

You got this bro, and with Brown Eyed Girl, you'll be playing a wedding venue near us soon.

It's funny how well that slowly increasing the bpm works. I've been trying to add some slick bluegrass licks lately and I'm playing faster than I thought possible.

Just say green eyed girl, win win.

I'm still at a plateau between my lessons. Just trying to solidify everything I've learned so far before moving on too much. I'm slowly but surely getting better. My basic chord changes are good more times than they're bad, though for some reason I still struggle with going from most chords to D major. I can do the G Major Scale in my sleep up and down with alternate picking at 110 bpm. Any faster than that and I start getting sloppy. Rhythm and strumming patterns are still taking some effort. I've been playing a lot with a metronome to try and improve that.

I don't have a live teacher and I'm learning from videos. On one hand it's nice because it's free and I can do them anytime, but I'm also not getting proper feedback and I'm having to learn some stuff the hard way. Say for example, I was having a lot of problems with notes sounding wrong and it was driving me crazy why some of them sounded like arse. It turns out I needed new strings as mine were an unknown age (no lie, they were probably 10 years old or more). It makes sense in hindsight, but it took me a while to figure that out and I wasted a few nights on some chords thinking I was playing them wrong. Another thing I had to learn on my own was how force of strumming affects everything. At night, I try and play softly because our house is small and I'm trying not to wake kids or my wife, but during the day when I can turn things up and really play, I find things are a lot easier and sounds better. So it's little things like that I have to learn on my own. Whatever. So it goes.

I'm learning more basic kids songs for my toddler, and my infant laughs up a storm when I play the major scale. That helps keep me going. My toddler really loves it when I put the pick in his hand and I help him play some single string songs like Twinkle Twinkle or Old Macdonald.

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I would bet many doll hairs there are virtual lessons available.

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There for sure are, but I'm so awkward with video conferencing that I try and avoid it as much as I can. If I stick with playing, I'll get some in-person lessons at some point.