I need some advice

Hi guy,

I have been "playing" for around 3 years. I know a thing or two but after all this time I don't feel like I really "know" how to play guitar. I can play along to a few songs, I can stumble through some basic riff's and lead but I really have no idea what I am doing which means that unless I am following TAB or playing along to a song I am lost.

I have tried a few online lessons but I struggle to know where to start. If I start in the beginners section I get bored quick because most of it I do know, chords, how to hold the guitar stuff like that.

So I am trying out guitar tricks, hoping for the best. Can anyone offer and sugeestions on how to get the most out of this site? Where would you recommend someone like myself start?

Thank you !

Do you know the magic L ?

Do you know why some chords sound better together than others ?

I didn't & I've been playing for over 20 years.

my naivity was to skip GF 1&2 , so glad I decided to start at the beginning.

I've picked up things from Lisa that every guitarist should know imo.

The lessons are easy to follow & if you know your chords etc already than great, watch the video & play with the band & move on.

Originally Posted by: fusionpnt1

Hi guy,

I have been "playing" for around 3 years. I know a thing or two but after all this time I don't feel like I really "know" how to play guitar. I can play along to a few songs, I can stumble through some basic riff's and lead but I really have no idea what I am doing which means that unless I am following TAB or playing along to a song I am lost.

I have tried a few online lessons but I struggle to know where to start. If I start in the beginners section I get bored quick because most of it I do know, chords, how to hold the guitar stuff like that.

So I am trying out guitar tricks, hoping for the best. Can anyone offer and sugeestions on how to get the most out of this site? Where would you recommend someone like myself start?

Thank you !

Start at the beginning. If you know the stuff in those early lessons and can perform it well, good on you! You can speed right through it. If you don't know it or can't play it well then you'll be learning stuff that is paramount to "know how to play guitar." And take Chet Atkins' quotation in my signature block to heart.

Good luck, have fun.

john

Originally Posted by: fusionpnt1

but after all this time I don't feel like I really "know" how to play guitar.

It won't hurt you to go through the fundamentals as pointed out, but it sounds like you are missing "how all the pieces fit together".

For example, if I were to ask if you could put together a litte something from the key of C, would you know what chords make up the key of C?

If you were jamming with friends and they told you they were in the key of "whatever", would you know the relative minor or major scales to solo with would be? Or would you to be able to determine what notes should sound good based upon the chord progression?

These are not critieques. Once I began grasping the concept of playing guitar and started delving into theory, things began making a lot more sense to me. For this year I am focussed on putting intellectual learning into smooth practical practice. Long term my goal would to be to play like some of the chums I have who have decades more experience than me, and always seem to know what to play and play it seemlessly. That is a long term goal, but I am moving towards it step by step.

This site is good to get you started and then to take you further, but going further requires knowing what to look for, or at least what questions to ask, and knowing where to find it. Christopher Schlegel has a tremendous lesson library to help along with of this, but I am not sure what is available to a registered user. You may have to be a paying member to access some of these lessons.

If, as a registered user, you have access to Christopher's forum, I would start there and post the question to him.

Good luck

For sure, I echo what others have said. Pay for a premium membership -- it is worth EVERY PENNY if you're serious about this. And start at the very beginning with fundamentals I. Lisa is a fabulous instructor and it will almost certainly fill in blanks and solidify things for you.

There is a lot of nuance there -- I don't think you'll get bored. And even if you do, might I gently suggest that boredom is perhaps part of the learning process sometimes ,and that things worth learning are worth it. We don't need to be stimulated and entertained 100% of the time.

I was in a similar situation -- I knew the open chords, basic music theory, and a few strum patterns, and a lot of what was covered in fundamentals I and II was stuff I already knew, but I didn't "know" it in the sense of really being able to integrate it into the larger picture, and I didn't have good technique, lots of bad habits. Now I'm almost through with Fundamentals II and I definitely feel like a guitar player for the first time, even though I'd been noodling around for years before this.

Start at the beginning. It is game changing.

I was tempted to jump to the more advanced stuff, purely because it looked more fun and I had fooled myself that I could remember and do more than I really could. Thankfully, good sense prevailed, for a change, and I've been ploughing diligently through the First Foundations course. Am I enjoying it? Yes and no.

No, because it's showing up how poor my guitar playing is! I'm currently tholing Three Days, trying to get a consistent change between A and B7 and the slide from C#m to B7, even though I don't really care for the song. I spent an hour and a bit working on it, the tips of my fingers on my left hand are sore and I don't feel I've cracked it yet. It is just one of those things.

Yes, because I've made a lot of progress since I've started, I have doubled my musical knowledge, which has helped significantly, and I can see that, as long as I stick with it, within the next couple of months I should be well on the road to reaching a reasonable level of competence. Personally, I'm looking forward to getting to scales - something I never quite understood how they worked, or put the work in to understand them, back when I was a teenager and was one of the reasons gave up.

Given the wealth of information and tution on offer here, I think it would be daft not to at least give it a try before you move to more advanced stuff.