Welcome mluvs2fish,

First of all Thank you for your service to our country! Your tale of guitar as theraphy is spot on. Guitar is a great place to find strength, solace, determination, and even meaning in the day to day.

Your observations, about being in a hurry and not getting anywhere, are also spot on! That is the experience of most people when they take up the insturment. It is not an easy row to hoe. This web page is constantly filled with people complaining that they have been playing to 2 to 12 months and they are not a virtuoso yet. It it my belife that this impatient point of view is the largest obstruction to ever becomming a master of their instrument.

Your observation about "taking it nice and slow and really get better" could be the most important lesson you will learn about guitar. You will return to this lesson again and again as you deal with navigating the plateaus of learning guitar. You are approaching a skill that demands years of consistant practice to get really good. You wouldn't expect a newbe to survive a NFL football scrimish.... would you? Yet people get impatient with learning the guitar.

Make no mistake about the two, seemingly divergent paths, they are more alike than most people realize. The biggest diffrence is that Football and guitar work on diffrent muscle sets. Guitar is focused mostly on miniscule muscular movements of your upper body, where football works on mass movements of the entire body. This perspective may seem to make learning guitar much easier, but that is misleading. In guitar you are working on micro-muscular movements, which does not bash up your body like being tackled does. However training those small muscles to reliable master the intracate moves required, is physically as complicated as learning to run, or throw and catch a ball... (if not more so, since you can continue to learn guitar long into your elder years)

Hold fast to your plan to "take it slow and get really better"!! That kind of thinking will serve you well, through out your musical life, as you explore the mastery of the guitar. You cant really force you muscles to do this stuff, you have to train them to do things they never would have attempted otherwise. THIS IS HARD! The fact is...Slow and steady wins this race, hands down. Congradulations on realizing the importance of patience in learning guitar. Welcome to the astonishing world of musicianship! ENJOY THE RIDE.....