My approach to learning to play guitar
Like many of you, I learnt a few guitar chords when I was at secondary school.
It was in a free lunch time club.
A few years later I had some 1:1 gu.itar les.sons with a guitar teacher at school, but I can't really remember what I learned then. I didn't do much score reading, and don't remember learning any picking techniques, so I guess it must have just been more chords. It was a while ago now ;-)
I bought gui.tar learning books and they were either "Row Your Boat" type stuff, or fairly heavy classical scroe exercisses.
I bought several chord books, but that didn't reelly help.
I bought several song sheet and music books of well known songs, but in thos edays there were chord diagrams and piano score. So you'd tend to end up just strumming and "singing" the melody.
Of course guitar TAB started to gain poplularity and you can find loads of that on the web these days.
However, this still hasn't really helped me! Firstly you don't get any clue to the rhythm, so you have to know the song. But also mainly because even with TAB it isn't clear what the tricks are to going between chords and melody.
I also find videos quite hard. Either the camera angles are wrong, or they play so fast, you can't make it out.
Then one day I had an epiphnay. Well several to be honest. And I realised what needed to happen to go to the stage of "guitar playing" rather than just strumming, or playing a melody.
I'll discuss more of this later on... But there is hope ;-) Meantime you can go here to see some of my guitar exercises in tab, audio and score notation and have some fun right now ;-).
Peter
It was in a free lunch time club.
A few years later I had some 1:1 gu.itar les.sons with a guitar teacher at school, but I can't really remember what I learned then. I didn't do much score reading, and don't remember learning any picking techniques, so I guess it must have just been more chords. It was a while ago now ;-)
I bought gui.tar learning books and they were either "Row Your Boat" type stuff, or fairly heavy classical scroe exercisses.
I bought several chord books, but that didn't reelly help.
I bought several song sheet and music books of well known songs, but in thos edays there were chord diagrams and piano score. So you'd tend to end up just strumming and "singing" the melody.
Of course guitar TAB started to gain poplularity and you can find loads of that on the web these days.
However, this still hasn't really helped me! Firstly you don't get any clue to the rhythm, so you have to know the song. But also mainly because even with TAB it isn't clear what the tricks are to going between chords and melody.
I also find videos quite hard. Either the camera angles are wrong, or they play so fast, you can't make it out.
Then one day I had an epiphnay. Well several to be honest. And I realised what needed to happen to go to the stage of "guitar playing" rather than just strumming, or playing a melody.
I'll discuss more of this later on... But there is hope ;-) Meantime you can go here to see some of my guitar exercises in tab, audio and score notation and have some fun right now ;-).
Peter
