Ask Lemmy

Put the sheet music down and noodle around every day for a few months

Most importantely have fun. Most people will tell you to practice regularly, but that's only possible if you genuinely enjoy playing. If you go for a daily routine of boring exercises, there's a chance it will create a loathing for the instrument and the practice, whereas if you do a bit of everything (cool riffs & refrains, tedious exercises, wild experiments, etc), you will build up a virtuous & pleasant realtionship with your instrument, and you will pick it up every day without even thinking about it.

Convince yourself that you're not improving because you need that one guitar, only to play for one month and let it catch dust afterwards.

I know everyone tries to avoid this and I'm sure you're trying to learn on the cheap like everyone else, but honestly, get a few lessons with a good local tutor. You'll learn more from them in a few short hours than you will with months of trying to do it yourself.

Famous guitarists never seem to say how much hard work went in to perfecting their craft, but it is a lot. And all the good ones took lessons and some still take lessons even though they're on international tours and have sold millions of albums.

Practice everyday, look into adjusting the action on your acoustic, and build calluses. Seriously though, practice everyday. There are no shortcuts to get around practice. If you practice anything enough you will get better at it.

Strumming patterns you'll just develop a feel for. You can practice that against your knee while just casually listening to the song. An exercise you can do for this is to practice three-chord rock songs. A LOT of songs are written with a progression of A, D, Em. Two examples off the top of my head are Louie Louie and Wild Thing. The difference between them is the rhythm.

I've been playing guitar for 25 years now, I do know how to read sheet music from band class in school, but I've never combined those two skills. I've been handed sheet music for Piano or some other part that had guitar chords over it, and a lot of the more intricate pieces I know I learned via tablature. The nice thing about tabs is they can be fairly easily made with ASCII.

You want a fairly easy way to make yourself sound WAY more impressive? If you're comfortable strumming chords, you can start picking individual strings instead. I like to use House of the Rising Sun as an example for this. The chord progression is Am, C, D, F, Am, E, Am, E. You can just strum along with a fairly simple rhythm, but, instead of strumming all strings, pick them individually as found in this tab. Your fret hand still does the exact same thing, but your pick hand does a little bit more. This song is a good introduction to this because your pick mostly goes "down" (physically toward the floor toward the higher strings) then back up a couple. It's also a fairly easy introduction to finger picking.

Fun fact about House of the Rising Sun: It's in common meter. Which means you can swap the lyrics for other common meter songs into it to interesting effect. Many of Emily Dickenson's poems are in common meter. So is Amazing Grace and the theme tune of Gilligan's Island. You can have a lot of fun mixing and matching lyrics with melodies. It's a fun trick to have in your repertoire when you're passed a guitar at a bonfire or something.

Justin Guitar, dude. On YouTube. Justin Guitar. Do it.

Practice regularly until you get blisters. Go on minimum amount of time until they're good enough you can play some more until you build callus where you need it.

Learn wonderwall by oasis and play it for everyone 😏

Try new songs that seem easy till you find one that actually is easy, drill it till you can do it decently, try another song and do the same. That was me 25 years ago and I still love to play.

Learn to read guitar tabs, listen to single parts of the song till you can play that part and keep going till you have each part.

I found it way easier with songs I liked. They were probably harder to play but it kept me interested.

A video of someone playing the song might help with the strumming pattern but you get an ear for it pretty quick.

The best advice I have for strumming patterns is to just listen to the song and try and just focus on the rhythm. Down strokes sound a little beefier and up strokes are a little more jangly. I'm terrible at identifying chords by ear but can get the rhythm down pretty much immediately. It just comes with time.

As far as playing songs I would not worry about playing just like the recording but just getting close enough that it's recognizable.

I really enjoy it, but I feel like I'm starting to slow down again

This is how it goes for me and I've been playing for quite awhile. Feels like I stagnate then an "aha! moment" happens and I'm rejuvenated. Eventually I started taking lessons to improve.

Don't bother with sheet music IMO. Tabs are all you need. Learn the major open chords first, they'll get you farther along quicker than anything else. Don't fret (pun intended) if you are learning a song and it doesn't sound 100% the same.

Learning guitar takes some dedication before you feel like you're really getting it. Practice at least 30 minutes a day and it will come to you but it may be months before it sounds like music. As long as you're having fun. I tell people it's like learning to tie your shoe laces. All muscle memory. It was difficult at first but now your hands do it without you having to think about it or even look at it. Soon your hands with form those chord shapes the same way. Good luck!

Grab a circle of 5ths app and lean chords in these progressions.

I found an app called chord ai I don't particularly like AI but an AI that can tell me a chord in any song. I kind of fuck with that.

Just to add to my other comment, rocksmith is awesome if you have the reflexes for it. Otherwise, songsterr is great too. For learning strumming patterns I'd say relax your wrist and make sure your strap height is comfortable. I keep mine raised quite a bit to be able to hit high frets with ease. A lot of guitarists will disagree with me but use a thin pick and light strings.

Also, as I said in my other post adjust string action and practice everyday. I've been playing since I was a teenager and I play all styles of music. My forte is advanced lead stuff but my advice works for rhythm guitar as well. I'd say if your goal is rhythm you may be drawn to thicker picks, thicker strings, and lower strap height, but it's really about what feels comfortable to you.

Also, if you have any interest learning fingerstyle you may want to start on a nylon string guitar. I used a guitalele at the beginning and the difference in comfort blew my mind. Now I only play steel string acoustic when I need to record fingerstyle acoustic stuff, but there's a reason nylon strings are great for beginners.

If you need more advice about anything else guitar related just hit me up. I love passing down my knowledge.

Don't watch any more videos. No more instruction and forced repetition of songs that already exist. Just play and play and play at least 10 minutes a day. Strum your fingers, listen to the sounds you are making, try to find pleasant ways to stitch together chords and strums into unique novel arrangements. Don't try to memorize twinkle twinkle or your favorite song. Make something new with the pallette you have unlocked in yourself.

A lot of music instrument people are academic theorist in their mentality. It saddens me to see creative types take what should be beautiful expressions of spontaneous whimsy and turns playing into dry formalized literature. Theres a reason its called playing the guitar and not working the guitar.

If you spend your time trying to learn the 'right way' as defined by so called guitar experts, you'll never experience learning how to play your way. Theres joy in finding new chords by chance, learning how to turn cacauphany into melody by sheer practice over the months/years and feeling the music come from inside. The art ends up more authentic and original that way, I feel.

Practise by accompanying your favourite music. That way you don't get hung up on the strumming pattern and focus on enjoying, which is what keeps you coming back for practice.

There are abundant beginner videos on YouTube that teach strumming. I think the important thing is to mix learning technique with just enjoying making music by any means.

(Source, self taught playing 20 years)

I don't wanna be a buzzkill, but if you've only been practicing for a month so far, I'm not sure there's gonna be any particular resource that's going to make you improve faster, short of taking formal lessons. It sounds like you're already making good progress, so just keep doing what you're doing! Read that book you downloaded, add new finger exercises to your daily routine, and drill the chords and scales and such into your muscle memory so you can do them in your sleep. But this all takes time.

The biggest factor, at least for me, was consistently practicing for years. I've been playing for about 17 years now and, by the end of the first year, I had spent hundreds of hours with the guitar in my hand (it was my primary hobby). I'm no rock star, but I got pretty decent by just practicing the stuff I wanted to play and learning the basic fundamental concepts like scales, arpeggios, chord structure, etc.

One good piece of advice my old man gave me: even when you're not actively practicing, just having the guitar in your lap when you're working on other stuff winds up making it extremely comfortable to handle. I'd sit with the guitar in my lap while doing homework, or using the computer, and would end up fiddling with it here and there, gradually getting better at navigating the neck, getting more familiar with the distances between the strings, etc.

And use. the. pinky. A lot of guitarists shy away from fretting with the pinky finger if they can avoid it, but they're doing themselves a disservice. Put in the effort to train your pinky to fret and it will pay dividends when you start tackling more advanced stuff. Even if you can easily hit a note with your ring finger, hit it with the pinky to give the pinky more practice so it becomes second nature.

Find some finger exercises that help teach finger independence. I learned a great one from a Chet Atkins VHS tape back in the day, but I can't find it anywhere online at the moment; I'm sure there's a million similar exercises on YouTube though.

If you're learning a song through a video on YouTube and it doesn't tell you the strumming pattern or the tuning or whatever, you can probably find that info on Ultimate Guitar. I'm not affiliated with them, just been using their site for basically the entire time I've been playing. Has an absolute mountain of chord charts, tabs, yada yada. Very useful.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. 🎸

Keep at it! The learning curve is not a straight line, just like with any skill. You'll see fast progress, just to be followed by a long plateau of no progress or even feel you're getting worse. And then you notice possibly big improvement again. And again.

Don't worry about following sheets/chords initially. If chords are not in your muscle memory, you're basically doing three complex tasks simultaneously, reading, figuring out chords and fingering chords. I'd try to memorize one or two simple pieces first, to get the chords under your belt. Start simple and stay patient, it'll take time.

Don't forget the rhythm. Play on top of recordings. You can be pretty liberal with the harmonics, but if you keep a steady beat it'll probably still sound good.

If you want to get better, you have to practice every single day.

You're going to suck at first, but then you're going to suck less. You have to learn enjoy the process, which it sounds like you do, so great! I like to break up my play time into practicing something new and having fun; they're both important.

One thing I've found is that keeping my guitar out and on the wall makes it a lot easier to get started playing, even if I don't feel like it at the time. Once I'm about five minutes into playing, I'm into it.

Oh, and practice with a metronome. Most guitarists suck at rhythm (myself included). Using a metronome beats it into your head.

Don't give up.

Slow down. A lot. Slow down a painfully annoying and boring amount and rep the hard chord changes, the weird melodies, any of it. All of good technique is just good muscle memory and muscle memory is only built up through repetition.

Remember that every bad habit that you don't nip in the bud early can have after effects to your technique for years.

In my opinion, outside of some specific songs, strumming pattern will end up being your personal touch. You'll strum in a certain way, and as long as the chord progression is right, it'll sound correct. More attention will be paid when you're playing individual notes. The rest is really up to you, and that's probably going to seem frustrating at first, but it's really liberating once you've been playing for a while.

My personal recommendation is to learn stairway to heaven by Led Zeppelin in its entirety. There are a lot of unusual chords, barre chords, techniques, etc in that one song. Additionally, you'll need to either practice hybrid picking or finger picking. When you finally learn it completely, almost any other song will seem easy to learn. I learned it in my first few months playing guitar (20 years ago) and I'm so happy that i did, i still find it pretty easy to pick up most other songs, but also find myself playing it from time to time.

I bought a poster of all the chord shapes and would constantly run through the whole thing while watching TV and a huge Beatles book because everyone knows Beatles songs. They literally taught us a bunch of them in grade school music classes growing up. After a couple of years of basic chord structure and strumming, I then moved on to learning scales. Mostly right now, concentrate on chord shapes, building up hand strength, and strumming. Pick easy three chord songs that you know and enjoy and play the heck out of them.

Best thing to do to make sure you enjoy playing the instrument is to take it to your local guitar shop for a setup. If it's not set up well it takes much more pressure to fret the notes cleanly and it can be painful both on your finger tips and the muscles in your hand.

Get a setup so its comfortable to play and you'll be able to play much longer.

Hold the books and lesson videos for 6 months to a year. Learn by playing music you want to learn. Songs you love. Start with some easy 3-4 chords stuff. Get the strumming by playing along with the song. Add in a lick that you can manage. Gradually progress into more complex songs with new chords. Get comfortable with singing along. Enjoy it. Enjoy it enough that you want to play a bit more each day.