Learn to play the guitar

but oh so difficult to master. I’ve got a decent handle on them, but it still takes too long to change between chords to them—little frustrating. Nice thing is that you can play them anywhere so learning one “shape” of chord will give you at least 12 new sounds to play with.

http://www.betterguitar.com/Instruction/Improvising/ImprovisingIndex.html

This is kind of an improvisation / creating solos for dummies. Which I am so it works out great. It’s all pretty simple, you have some chords for rythm and then you play over that. The trick is making sure your chords & notes are in the same key, if they are then it’s really easy to put together stuff that sounds good. This shows you how to learn a scale to play with some specific chords. Takes practice though.

http://guitar.about.com/library/blguitarlessonarchive.htm

They have an exhaustive supply of articles there about simply everything you could imagine. However I’ve often found that the general quality of thier stuff was pretty mediocre. I am happy to report that they have a series of beginner guitar “lessons” that are pretty good. I already know a lot of the basics, but I’ve been using parts of these recently—they have good ideas for practice (or at least just different ones) and when practicing basic skills it helps greatly to have a bit of variety to stave off the boredom of pure repition. Finding different ways to practice the same skills is golden.

For complete beginners its organised into an intelligent progression, similar to what you would encounter in a class or other commercial resource. When learning on your own some skills seem monumentally difficuly, but if you build your abilities in the right way that can be very easy things to learn later.

Each lesson is quite long and covers lots of topics, so there’s sure to be something for everyone.

Who learned to read music along with playing guitar? Tabs are all over the place and are easy to use but you have to know the song already to play it corectly from tabs—there’s no timing information on them.

While not very good I’m learning to read music as well—it’s distracting when songbooks have tabs & standard notation next to each other, I have a hard time tryinig to ignore the tabs & read the music instead.

It’s really about how much time you put in and having someone to show you how to do things right the first time lets you improve rapidly. I took a saturday begniner class at the local college, and combined with a lot of practice took me from knowing nothing to being pretty adept at the basics. I have ears of tin, and no rythm at all but I can still play a bit, and have a decent foundation for learning more.

If you don’t think you have time for it I’d encourage you to make time anyway. That and make time to practice on your own.