Best place to self teach guitar?
 

I only know the very basics in guitar and am having a tuff time teaching myself.

Where is the best place to look online for help.

I play with friends, and have them show me things, but i need somewhere to look regularly, and can;t afford lessons at the moment.

i taught myself to play through guitar world magazines. never really used online lessons much.

this place seems decent enough. Guitar Lessons and Easy Songs for Guitar - Guitar Noise it never hurts to just google and see what random sites have to offer.

are you looking for more theory or technique based lessons? i always found having a specific goal helped me focus on practicing and developing my own style and technique. depending on what you're looking to learn i might be able to help you out in this thread, although my knowledge of theory is pretty weak.

I will offer what I know. When I started learning it was strictly chords. Simple songs like Steve Millers "The Joker" and Nirvana's "About a Girl". These kinds of songs are great for people that just want to learn a bit of guitar because you learn your chord structures and rhtyhm (rhythm I don't see you having much trouble with). I've been playing for a while and when I started getting bored of tabs and chords I started learning theory. See when you know your chord structures allready when you start learning theory everything really comes together (root notes, scale structure). But I would recommend anybody starting out to just learn your scales (start with major of course) and play the hell out of it everywhere all over the neck. I believe that is the best way to learn but sadly the most boring. Thats why most people start out playing "About a Girl" and if they don't get bored of it they just get better.
EDIT : A very fun scale to just mess around with is the Blues Scale (Pentatonic I think). It's what so much rock and blues have been based around and is real simple to play but there is so much you can do with it. I advise you to print out some tabs with major minor and pentatonic scales and just go hard man. Oh and yeah don't forget with bit torrent all the cool apps you can acquire to help you learn. I'm sitting on "Metal Method" right now just haven't had time to practice lately.

Patience is the most important thing. Understand it is a process, play what you like to listen to. Listen specifically to the music and try to pick out familiar sounds after you learn a few basic chords.

First know a little about the string E-A-D-G-B-e in standard tuning when plucked open.

Then...

I'd say start by learning 5-10 basic chords: I'd suggest A, Am, B, Bm, C, D, E, Em, F, G. You can play the melody of over half the guitar pop music ever written with those chords. You can find them a million places online.

Then learn a few basic scales. I'd recommend the standard scale. Here it is in tab form (E: O-1-3 A: O-2-3 D: O-2-3 G: O-2 B: O-1-3 e: O-1-3)

and the standard blues which can be played on varying frets to change key and in tab from is: E: 1-4 A: 1-2-3 D: 1-3 G: 1-3-4 B: 1-4 e: 1-4

Hammer those home day after day while learning the chords and you'll see progress in your ability as well as your understanding of how to make certain sounds with the guitar.

Good luck and most important have fun.

absolutely.

theory and technique only go so far. eventually you have to find your voice. and like your real one you have to take what you've got. some fingers just aren't meant to do certain things. (this is when you start collecting pedals hehe)

i also got my first guitar on feb. 14 1993 haha it had absolutely nothing to do with v-day but makes it easy to remember exactly when i started hehe. it's also the reason i learned from magazines as opposed to the net. tabs were one thing (and important), but i probably learned more from the interviews and lessons.

Thanks for the help Dave and Jay, i got the chords down (well the basic ones) just now working on making them flow well.

I have a tuff time understanding many of the tabs though.

I guess like the drums, i shall learn in time.

there's only one way to make the chords flow well together and that's practice.

i find 'jane says' by jane's addiction is a great simple tune to get used to switching chords and working in a simple lick. it's really just two chords repeated over 2 basic patterns for the duration of the song. (i'm typing this from memory so the rhythm is probably not 100% accurate)

G--------A
*--*--*-^-^--*
---3-------------------------
---3-----2-2---2-------------
---0-----2-2---2--4-2--------
0--0---0-2-2---2-------4-2---
2--2---2-0-0---0-------------
3--3---3---------------------


G-------------A
*-*-^-*----*-^-^
---3-3-3----------------------
---3-3-3-------2-2------------
---0-0-0-------2-2--4-2-------
0--0-0-0----0--2-2------4-2---
2--2-2-2----2--0-0------------
3--3-3-3----3-----------------


i'm using * and ^ to designate the basic direction of the strum. * being a downstroke starting with the low E and ^ being an upstroke starting from the smaller strings. those top two lines would be a lot cleaner if the forum didn't auto delete multiple blank spaces.

the other trick to playing this tune is to use a simplified fingering to play the A chord. traditionally you're supposed to be using three fingertips to fret the A, but laying the top of your index finger across the three strings as if you were playing a bar chord works just as well. which also makes it a lot easier to do the single note lick by using your ring finger to hit the notes on the 4th fret while continuing to let the last A chord ring out over top.

using the index finger method also mutes the high E and sometimes the B string depending on how hard you're pressing. this is not necessarily a bad thing. so long as the bulk of the chord rings through the muted strings will add a nice percussive thickness to the sound.

if you don't already know the song give it a listen first and try focusing on the groove. don't worry if you can't get it sounding just right from the get go. navarro uses a fair amount of muting and overdubs to get a really nice thick acoustic sound going on that track. if you find you have a hard time getting the groove just forget about actually playing the chords for a bit and focus on getting the rhythm in your strumming hand. just mute everything with your fretting hand and try getting the 'chk chikkachikka chk chk chk' going.

you WILL learn to love left hand muting if you ever want to play anything by the chili peppers. speaking of which, 'breaking the girl' is another good song to practice basic chord changes with. the official tab book version is kind of lame though, lucky for me i had learned it from a magazine prior to getting the book. but let's see how you handle 'jane says' first hehe

The way I taught myself the guitar was to just find songs and learn to play them the whole way through with the cd, this helped me develop a good sense of rhythm/dexterity and accuracy. As I got better I just went on learning more complicated songs until I started to compose my own.

Another simple Jane's Addiction song to learn is "City". Look it up on youtube, it will give a good idea of timing and strumming

G C over and over then D not unlike so many other other tunes out there hehe.

the story behind the city song is pretty entertaining as well. the band was supposed to meet for a radio interview / performance but eric avery and stephen perkins got bad directions and never made it. perry farrel and dave navarro ended up improvising the tune during their radio segment. until the 'kettle whistle' compilation was released the only place you could find the tune was on the 'soul kiss' vhs.

I'm a ****ing huge Jane's fan, glad to find another. Have you seen the acoustic version of Ain't No Right on youtube before?

not yet, but i had this biography about farrell and jane's called 'whores' and they talked about how they would do an acoustic version of their sets before every show. so i wouldn't be surprised to learn that you can find an acoustic version of all of their tunes if you dug hard enough.

I'd say buy a good book in your music shop..
I did that, it was a book (in my language Dutch, but it
was translated from English) where you could
learn the guitar step by step.. I've been playing for 3 years
now and a lot of people don't believe that I learned all of
this just from a book..
You can also learn on your own tempo, that's pretty useful

I would assume that even Youtube would have some basic instructional videos.

The internet is incredibly helpful, whether you're using google, youtube, or anything really; there's a lot of information on techniques, theory, and everything else you're looking for in terms of actual music knowledge (finding your own voice is your own pursuit though).

One thing I will say though: tabs can be helpful yes (especially at first), but if that is your mainstay on how you learn, I think you could get yourself in troubles in some ways. Your ears are the most important part, and it's best if you train yourself to learn simply with them. Eventually you really realize how much everything really overlaps and it's really not too hard because a lot of music uses really simple musical concepts. I guess I just feel that mimicking some numbers on a tab doesn't help your musical knowledge in any sense, because you're not understanding anything, you're just mimicking and memorizing. I think it's best if you go about it to understand what it is you're playing. Not that you have to learn the theory behind it per say (though that definitely helps), but so that you actually have some basis of musical knowledge. For example, Hendrix didn't know "theory," as theory I don't think, he just had great musical knowledge. In a sense he was using theory (just like anyone who plays guitar is, whether you know it or not), but he didn't know it as some textbook form of theory; it was simple musical understanding if that makes sense.

Thanks for the reply, but this thread is over a year old now. I have moved way past where I was.