Metal Reviews

so i just turned 22 and i'm thinking of getting a guitar to learn to play and all. thing is i don't have the time/money for lessons, and as far as i know i am musically talentless. is it possible to teach myself? any suggestions (books, dvds, etc.)?

better late than never, by the way, eh?

Been meaning to ask something like this. A lot of the great players (Alex Lifeson comes to mind) seem to be largely self-taught, but presumably it can be done sooner than 30+ years...

if you don't have time to take lessons, will you have time to practice? lessons are only like half an hour a week while you should practice for at least half an hour a day. with all the information on the internet you can teach yourself, but, like anything else, unless you do it often you probably won't get very far. lessons are probably the best/most reliable way to learn basic technique, and a good teacher is the best way to get you to practice often and productively. i wouldn't worry about being 22, the only bad thing about starting late is that you don't have as much free time as someone in high school

i don't know of any guitar instruction stuff but this is a good site for starting to learn music theory:
http://musictheory.net/index.html

Get a beginners book, a metronome and start practising. I learned to play all by myself. It won't be a problem if you're diciplined. After a while you can search for tabs and play along with simple songs. I will reccommend that you'll try to "catch" the song by listening to it, and try to play along.

i really need to learn more stuff by ear. any time i try to i get something that's vaguely close, then i end up jamming on that for an hour instead of trying to learn the song T_T

i have an irregular schedule, so while i do have free time i don't know when i have it, that's why i didn't want lessons.. and i can't be arsed to pay either lol.

I taught myself to play by learning to read tablature on the internet. Then learning to play various songs. For me, it was basically about becoming comfortable with a guitar in my hand. Then I got the infamous chord chart poster and went from there, as I learned to play on a Grandpas Guitar.

As far as musical theory, and time signatures, and scales, and tunings, etc. go, stuff like that really can't be self-taught. Theres a million and one books out there, and I'm sure they'd pretty much all teach the same thing.

After I graduated from the Acoustic, Daddy bought me a Dean for my birthday, and I got one of those 500-in-1 effects pedals and a nice practice amp. Then it was a matter of mixing the right distortion effect with the right tuning and creating endless amounts of chunky riffs.

If you want to shred, scales and tremolo picking is what you're going to want to study, along with maybe some fingertapping which, from my experiences, has been the most challenging aspect of the guitar for me.

In the end, nobody becomes Alexi Leiho overnight. You only get out of the guitar, what you put into it...which is the same for anything.
Good luck, and happy shredding.

Get lessons to learn the basics and make sure you don't pick up any bad habits. After that you can do anything you want.

Fingertapping is IMO the easiest lead technique... Sweeping however, and especially six-string-sweeps are a fucking pain in the brown eye. I never took lessons, and I have managed to teach myself scales and combinations and techniques, with a lot of reading. That demands a certain ammount of discipline, and I struggled for a long time with stuff that I would've come easier with a teacher.

Fingertapping IMO is just for show. Seriously, if you have to hammer-on with a fret spread that rediculous, just get longer fingers.

I've been playing guitar for almost 25 years and recently have been hired on as a guitar instructor locally, near my home. Please feel free to ask any questions at all. PM me if you like. I would be glad to help you.

As for your original question:

Anyone, and I do mean anyone, with patience and a little bit of persistence can learn how to play guitar. If you're self motivated and really want to learn how to play then that is half the battle.

most excellent. i'll try to find something second-hand this weekend.

Good that you decided to go ahead with it. I started like 2 years ago and I'm 23 now. I can play songs that are deemed difficult by some, but I absolutely cannot perform a full solo to save my fucking life. I need to practice some scales and shit, but never have the time to do it. But the only technique that I have absolutely not came even close to playing is sweep picking. Like metal_xxx said I find it the hardest technique to conquer.

These are all my favourite chord shapes, all in E, you can move them easily around the fretboard. I tune in EADGCF to make it that much easier since i'm a strong single note player)

NOTES - FRET (EADGBE)

EAXXXX - 00XXXX - P4
EBXXXX - 02XXXX - P5
FAXXXX - 10XXXX - M3
ECXXXX - 03XXXX - m6
EAEXXX - 002XXX
EBEXXX - 022XXX
EAEAXX - 0022XX
EBEBXX - 0224XX (Hard to use unless close to pickups or open)
EBEAXX - 0222XX (good on higher octave)
EADXXX - 000XXX

I play like an 80's pop guitarist that uses a lot of 2 and three note chords and a lot of single notes and play all over the place and generally move my hands around to change keys instead of my fingering.

Other than that I use a handy chart that plots where every note on the fretboard and a chart of the notes positions to each other and make some calculations to see where the next melodic note is in the progression. easy stuff.

as long as the chord i'm playing is the same key as the chord of the song, you can use these kinds of simple chords to replicate more difficult materia and gradually work harder chords into the mix as necessary.

All you need to do to learn guitar is play some of your favourite songs and see what note progressions you like and what you don't like, use what you like and learn what works and what doesn't. try to write simple melodies in your head and play them to get familiar with wear every note is supposed to be.

That's all the advice I have at this time.

I'm really struggling with tremolo-picking at the moment. It's keeping it consistent for long enuogh which is my trouble. As evidenced by me trying to play this riff: http://www.box.net/shared/o0cp53sedm. (I know the filename is 'guess' but you don't get any points if you do guess, I know I'm not great but it is a classic! :p )

By the way, I started when I was 33, I'm 36 now. I was always musically talentless before so I must have picked up something somewhere along the line... hehe.

Emperor! Love dat riff. But yeah you sound pretty good...I just started playing a few months ago because I'm taking a guitar class at school, but I've pretty much picked up tremolo picking right off the bat...haven't really had trouble with it. Can't really give any good advice, though, because I'm still a noob.

In other news, I'm kind of disappointed with how formulaic guitar playing is with all the note/chord progressions, scales, and general rules for playing stuff that sounds good. I guess I thought it would be less restrictive.

EDIT: Also what is this chord chart that people speak of?

Yep.
I wish I had taken lessons, things would have been so much easier.
Sweeping arppegios are fucking difficult. I find the downsweep half to be much easier than the upsweep to synchronise with the left-hand movement.
I would also add to reading and learning scales / shapes, theory, etc. this: watch instructional videos.
And practice, practice, practice.
Then practice some more.
One of the hardest parts about learning the guitar is not becoming disheartened; it takes a lot of time and effort to shred.
Good luck.

Thats western music in general, dude. But if you want to be all 21st century and avant garde, feel free to ignore the tonal system, rhythm, and do crazy things like use your guitar as a drum.

And I agree that fingertapping is pretty easy- it just takes a lot of practice at the beginning. Sweeping is ridiculously hard and along with pitch harmonics is one of the things I'm only able to do very rarely.

they're more guidelines than restrictions. once you've got the basic rules down then you can break them and just play what sounds good to you, without necessarily going to the extremes of avant-garde that Brahm mentioned

After two years of intense practise I learned to sweep pretty clean both 3,4,5-string. 6-string is still a fucking bitch. The problem now is that I haven't learned a tenth of all the scales and patterns and stuff.. So when I'm composing I'm just experimenting, not really knowing what to do...

And I don't find pinch harmonics that hard.. Learned it pretty early actually... Was a bitch to get into though.