Resolved to learn guitar... again

Scales, chords. Learn what you want to play. Practice scales and fretting chords every day. It WILL hurt at first, but it gets better as you build up those callouses. F bar chord is hard for everyone when they first start. Ultimate-guitar.com is awesome for learning chords and tabs. Get a live human guitar teacher at first to make sure you learn proper technique at the start and ensure bad habits don’t get ingrained.
Once you learn the following chords (major, minor, and 7), most country songs will be in your grasp:
E, A, F, D, C, G
Practicing scales (major, minor, and pentatonic) will teach finger independence as well as train your brain to know what sounds right for soloing and picking.

My suggestion to anyone who wants to learn to play guitar is start by learning basic open chords and bar chords on an acoustic guitar.Ultimate Guitar is an excellent website for that.You have to build strength and flexibility in your fingers on your fretting hand and develop calluses.It can take a little time to acquire all three of the above but will happen faster the more you practice.Youtube is an amazing resource for beginning guitarist that was not available when I began to play 35 years ago.Once you learn the basic chords look up guitar lessons for songs you enjoy on YouTube and learn what you love to listen to.

This may be a dumb af question, but can someone explain a scale to me?



Also, thanks for all the advice. I’ve been spending around an hour every night learning basic chords and practicing fingering them and beginning to try to link them together. All while dabbling in basic guitar/music theory

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This may be a dumb af question, but can someone explain a scale to me?

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A scale is the collection of notes within a particular key. For a major scale it's basically the do-re-me-fa-so-la-te-do you may have learned as a child. Which in it's most basic form (for a major scale) is 7 notes and they run either ascending or descending.

Example: Notes in key of C Major: (IE - the C major scale)

1 - C
2 - D
3 - E
4 - F
5 - G
6 - A
7 - B
8 - C (starts over and keeps on repeating and going on)

This would be a major scale; however there are other type scales such as penatonic (which is 5 notes), or a couple different blue's scale, and even minor scales. There are others but they all just repeat and have a different number or intervals (or steps between them). In western music what we normally listen to, for arguments sake there are 12 notes and of these only a subset is used for each particular scale.

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F bar chord is hard for everyone when they first start.

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Youtube “why you suck at guitar” his channel is more metal centric, but his “why your bar chords suck video” made it click for me. It was really helpful in showing me EVERYTHING I was doing wrong and how to fix it. The F doesn’t bother me anymore. Am I flying all over the neck changing barre chord shapes? No. But a major hurdle was cleared. Just being able to grab that F without buzz is/was a huge win.

Post above made it click! A scale is a particular set of notes, and the chords of that scale are made up of said notes.

Start learning the fretboard. There are apps for practicing fretboard memory. One you know where the notes are it’s easier to understand what a note is and how they go together to form a scale.