wirt
So, I've started this thread as a kind of public log of my progress from absolute beginner to hopefully being able to express myself musically with one of the finest musical instruments ever made: the guitar. No man is an island and I figured something like this would help to keep me motivated to play, perhaps provide some entertainment value to the other forumites and maybe even help other beginners who stumble upon my ramblings avoid the same mistakes I made. I'm not specifically looking for feedback, if you can read this and chuckle at my stupidity I'd consider it a success ? Updated periodically whenever I feel the need to rant about something.
Chapter 1: How to not learn guitar, by Wirt.
1. Buy a guitar without knowing a single thing about anything about guitars. Just pick the one that looks coolest and that you can afford. When the salesman dodges your questions about whether it's a decent guitar or not like a seasoned politician simply assume he's not a very talkative fellow.
2. Everybody knows that in order to be a master, you have to learn from a master. So disregard all the beginner's courses and download every single tutorial DVD and video you can find by Zakk Wylde, Paul Gilbert and Steve Vai. Attempt each lesson only once before giving up.
3. Never, ever learn any chords. You want to be a lead guitarist capable of shredding at a billion notes per seecond. Chords are for old people and folk guitarists and Bob Dylan wasn't noted for his shredding skills. Except power chords. Those are OK.
4. In order to become a lead guitarist, you need fast fingers. In order to get your prestidigitation up to scratch, learn exactly one scale. Practice it in one direction only.
5. Spend 50 minutes out of every 1 hour practice session looking up gear on the internet.
6. Buy a crappy multi-effects pedal. Spend almost all of your time mastering it by playing the same power chord over and over again on the different settings.
7. You probably heard about "Smoke on the water" being banned in some music shops because beginners play it constantly. Obviously that must be because it's a great riff for a beginner to learn, right? Learn the riff and practice it constantly, marvelling at how good you sound through your amp on high gain. Stroke your ego a bit, you deserve it for working so hard.
8. When your friend, who's been playing for several years, plays your guitar and calls it a Piece Of Shit(tm), ignore him as well as his reasons for saying so.
9. When that same friend offers to teach you something, don't take him up on it. Avoid any situation that might reveal how little you really know about playing guitar.
10. This one is important: Never take personal responsibility for your lack of progress. If only you didn't have such huge hands you wouldn't be struggling to get all your fingers on frets close to each other. If you had a harder pick you would be able to pick notes easier. If you only started playing when you were younger, you could have had all that started-at-a-young-age in-born talent. Give up easily and set unreasonably high expectations for improvement.
I have followed all these steps religiously from the first time I ever picked up a guitar with the intention of mastering it, and in no time at all I was even worse off than I started. I was arrogant, impatient and had no self-discipline when it came to practising. I got absolutely nowhere at all and my failure developed into a sense of self-loathing pretty damn fast. The breaking point came one day when I spoke to one of my dad's friends about learning guitar: "You just practice and practice and after six months it finally starts making sense", he said. SIX MONTHS!? Holy Hell. I want to be a good player NOW! If it was hard work learning to play it wouldn't be called "playing", would it? I almost never picked up that guitar again, it stood there in my room as a silent monument to failure.
Looking back, I'm glad I made those mistakes then when I had the time to make them. They will not be repeated.
Chapter 2 coming soon-ish.
Norman86
? Well said!
Manageable, obtainable, realistic goals are the ones to set! And practice practice practice ?
ps, guitars are not as easy as they sound on record or guitar hero!
pps, i still like guitar hero too!
hang in there, it gets better!
IceCreamMan
Wirt , u are a legend !!!!! man with this attitude will be smoking Vai in 6 months.....tops ....go get him
joealien22
Wirt! That was fantastic to read. You basically just explained the first 5 years of my guitar playing history. Then after learning as much as I could from friends and any other muso's that would give me the time of day, I finally lurked my way onto GFSA, and what a difference it has made to my playing and knowledge. The past year or so that I have been a member of GFSA I have improved 3-fold.
I look forward to reading Chapter two, as I hope it will resemble a turn-around like mine. Have fun moving into the future ?
Arno-West
Wirt, are you in the Randburg area? If so, pm me, pop in at my studio. I'll show you a few basic tricks that will turn your 6 months into 3. BTW, remember to take a saucer with a bit of turps in it and rest your finger tips in it while you watch TV. That will make the skin go hard and then the fingers won't hurt that much when practising 6 hours a day. PM me.
wirt
Before I continue with these ramblings, I must first again state that in no way am I anything else than a complete beginner. There's no happy ending to this yet. Maybe in some distant future I can finally post something that sounds like music on the Youtubes for you guys to check out, but right now I'm just a babe in the woods.
Also, thanks for the kind words and the comments guys.
Chapter 2
So, my Stagg H300 (a.k.a. The Tone-deaf Tone Machine) the monument to my failure stood collecting dust for about 4 years. I decided to try again, for various reasons. I got my hands on another guitar: A shiny Yamaha Pacifica. It's not an amazing guitar, as you all know, but compared to my old Stagg P.O.S., it was heaven. Terms like "action", "tone" and even "sustain" were finally heard, understood and experienced. The pick-up selector actually did something! It was awesome! While I eventually accepted that I was at fault for not knowing anything about playing guitar, I can at least lay a little of the blame on that horrible "guitar" I've been playing. But... motivation. I knew how difficult this was now. And I knew I failed before. It cast doubt on my abilities to ever accomplish what I wanted to do. So, I decided I'd just learn for the fun of it. Whether I accomplished something or not, I'd try my ass off for as long as it was fun to do so. So I thought long and hard about what I did wrong the last time, and made a new list.
How to maybe learn to play the guitar:
1. Admit that you suck. Like a guy at his first AA meeting: you have to admit that you have a problem. Keep yourself humble. If you can't do that, you are useless. You are terrible, but that's okay for now.
2. Start with the basics. Crawl before you walk, walk before you run. You wont be playing anything impressive for a long time yet. Stay in the shallow end of the pool where it's safe and easy. You'll be jealous of the big kids jumping in the deep end, but if you can take pleasure in just splashing around it will make it more than bearable.
3. Learn from anything, anyone and anywhere. Your mind must be a sponge. Knowing nothing, you must learn everything, but acknowledge what is too far beyond your current capabilities. Failure is OK, abysmal failure is demotivating. See point #1 and 2.
4. Nothing is true just because someone says it is. Also, not all knowledge is good knowledge. Examine every new thing you try on your guitar with a microscope and eradicate and eliminate bad technique as soon as it crops up. Just because you think you can do something doesn't mean you can do it properly.
5. Know the difference between practice and playing. No improvement comes without a struggle. If you're not digging deep, you're probably not learning anything new.
5. Keep your guitar close to where you spend your free time. Keep it in sight. Let that sucker stare at you while watching TV. Feel it's judging glare. Never allow yourself to forget what that finely crafted machine is capable of if only you'd learn to unleash it. (See point #1.) Whenever you're not doing something that requires the use of your hands, grab that guitar and practice something. Even if only for a couple of minutes.
6. Practice when you feel like it, don't set yourself a specific time. Some days will be good, some days you'l feel like your fingers have been turned into salami's and nothing goes right no matter how hard you try. When a good day comes along, ride that wave for as long as it will hold your carcass aloft and revel in it. When it's a bad, day don't beat yourself up about it. It happens.
7. USE A FUCKING METRONOME. Chain your picking hand to it's rhythm. You'll hate it, you'll fight against it, but when you lose your way, it will guide you back home no matter how much you scream at it.
8. Learn the theory and apply it, it's more fun than you think.
9. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect. It's been said before and often, and I don't know who to attribute the quote to, but I'm repeating it for my own benefit.
10. New gear will not make you a better player. If someone gave you that Les Paul and Fender amp you always wanted right now, you'd still suck. There might come a day when you'll find yourself unable to make a song sound the way it's supposed to no matter how well you play, but until then it will be your fault, not the fault your guitar, amplifier, pedal or anything else. So stop looking up gear, damnit.
I'm not saying all of the above is true, it's just things I've learnt thus far and which I consider most important right now. I suck at #1 on the list. I'm something of a perfectionist, and playing anything in front of anyone when I know I can't do it perfectly is hard for me. The ego refuses to die, but my girlfriend (who's been playing for over a decade) has convinced me to let her teach me a couple of things and I've grown slightly less ashamed about my low skill level. I rejoice in the small victories and it keeps me motivated. Most importantly, I made peace with the fact that I'm not going to be able to learn to play "Comfortably Numb" this year, or next year, or the year after that. But if I keep on this road and never stop walking, I know that song is somewhere ahead, waiting for me to catch up.
Now to practice changing from G to C and back again ?
Daler
I feel your pain....I picked up guitar for the first time in January this year at age 42. The will is strong, the fingers get tired, and the improvement is slow. But every day I get fractionally better. Some days I think I will never play a Dire Straits song, and then every now again I surprise myself. Just enough to keep me hungry. Who knows, by the time I am 80.......good luck with your journey. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out ?
psyx
Inspiring stuff guys! I try to play every day, even if times are tough and theres work to be done or some stuff to study. Even if it's just 30 minutes. Practice is practice.
Psean
Great thread! It has quite a few good reminders - thanks. I'm off to practice ?
wirt
Thanks for the kind words, everyone, I'l reply to you many kind folk individually in another post.
Since I kinda got called out in a recent forum newsletter, I must once again make the same claim I always have: I suck at guitar. I assure you, any wisdom arived at by me in this topic and any resemblance to intelligent thought, living or dead, is purely coincidental. ?
Anywho:
Chapter 3: The Road to Highway to Hell is Paved with Good Intonations.
Lots of energy tonight, which is strange considering it's a Monday and my job has turned into a black pit of despair from which the souls of the damned moan in chorus as the darkness sucks up all hope and echoes it's hunger for more suffering into the darkness beyond from where broken figures toil with bruised hands for their uncaring masters and their wailing is answered only by... *cough* Sorry about that. Anyway, so I'm fed up. Shit sucks and damn this freaking instrument that expects, nay, demands complete and total discipline and devotion. There are people out there playing songs that seemingly wire their player's guitars directly into your skull and here I am trying to memorize chords for keys and still struggling my ass off to change from D to G. The guitar just feels so... uncaring... on some nights, like a cold woman shunning your advances. So I decide "screw it", I'm not working on technique tonight. Theory can go screw itself and keys and majors and minors and suspended 4's (whatever the hell they are) can wait for another day. Imma learn me a song, by Thor. Something filled with righteous, joyous anger that I can give voice to my inner frustrated 16 year old kid and piss off the neighbours. The Thunda from Down Unda jumped into my brain. Looked up the tabs for "Highway to Hell", watched a couple of tutorial videos on the youtubes, and ladies and gentlemen, I was sitting in my chair in front of my PC grinning like an idiot. Laughing like a child at the shear perfection of it. The joy of the sound. This wasn't something that asked nicely for your attention, it grabs you by the ears and screams at you. I picked up my guitar and it just became alive. That uncaring apathetic piece of wood begged to be played and brothers and sisters, I obliged. Plugged that sucker into my little amplifier and I was jamming.
And it all made sense again.
The point of this rambling, if you have indulged me thus far, is this: The road is $*&#ing long and the road is &$^%#ing hard, and it sucks knowing you wont reach your destination for a long while yet. But: if you take the time to stop every once in a while and admire the view from where you are now, you might find it's quite beautiful too, despite it's simplicity.
Postscript: You know those annoying writers who write "you" when they mean "I"? You might be one of them, and they apologize ?
wirt
Daler wrote:
I feel your pain....I picked up guitar for the first time in January this year at age 42. The will is strong, the fingers get tired, and the improvement is slow. But every day I get fractionally better. Some days I think I will never play a Dire Straits song, and then every now again I surprise myself. Just enough to keep me hungry. Who knows, by the time I am 80.......good luck with your journey. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out ?
Any man who is willing to learn an entirely new skill at any age, if he works hard at it, deserves respect. No matter how much (or little) he achieves. As long as your having fun ?
Luc wrote:
Wirt! That was fantastic to read. You basically just explained the first 5 years of my guitar playing history. Then after learning as much as I could from friends and any other muso's that would give me the time of day, I finally lurked my way onto GFSA, and what a difference it has made to my playing and knowledge. The past year or so that I have been a member of GFSA I have improved 3-fold.
I look forward to reading Chapter two, as I hope it will resemble a turn-around like mine. Have fun moving into the future ?
I'm busy turning, man, busy. Right now I'm still the idiot in the 18-wheeler jack-knifed in the middle of the road holding up traffic, though ?
IceCreamMan wrote:
Wirt , u are a legend !!!!! man with this attitude will be smoking Vai in 6 months.....tops ....go get him
I've made peace with the fact that I won't but I'll damn sure be better at soloing than Fred Durst... I hope =
domhatch
wirt:
in these three 'little' chapters, you have unlocked three major learnings about starting out learning the guitar, in my opinion:
your chapter 1 - it will be hard, and you will make mistakes in every possible area. (i.e. murphy's law applies equally to budding guitar players.)
your chapter 2 - put in the effort, and you will see (hear) the results. (sometimes this ain't easy, so sometimes it pays to record yourself when you start and then a coupla weeks later. compare the first recording with the second. you might not think you've come far, but boy, oh boy.)
your chapter 3 - do not forget to let your inner 16 year old kid out to play, wherever you may be on your journey. (we're doing this for the love of the thing - so let's make sure we love what we're doing every once in a while...)
but i prefer it the way you wrote it.
dh
wirt
domhatch wrote:
wirt:
in these three 'little' chapters, you have unlocked three major learnings about starting out learning the guitar, in my opinion:
your chapter 1 - it will be hard, and you will make mistakes in every possible area. (i.e. murphy's law applies equally to budding guitar players.)
your chapter 2 - put in the effort, and you will see (hear) the results. (sometimes this ain't easy, so sometimes it pays to record yourself when you start and then a coupla weeks later. compare the first recording with the second. you might not think you've come far, but boy, oh boy.)
your chapter 3 - do not forget to let your inner 16 year old kid out to play, wherever you may be on your journey. (we're doing this for the love of the thing - so let's make sure we love what we're doing every once in a while...)
but i prefer it the way you wrote it.
dh
He he... Certainly wasn't planned like that, but I'm glad if it comes across as well-thought-out and structured. Thanks for reading, though ?
Dimitri-Nutt
+1
Quite inspiring. Thank you.
Looking forward to hear some more of your awesome ramblings ?
Well written.
wirt
Dimitri Nutt wrote:
+1
Quite inspiring. Thank you.
Looking forward to hear some more of your awesome ramblings ?
Well written.
My thanks, Dimitri. I'm getting my first ever guitar lesson tonight, so if Keira doesn't bludgeon me to death with my own guitar for playing like a demented orangutan I might have something else to write about ?
Note: Said bludgeoning is a reflection on my terrible playing, and not of the patience and skill at remaining calm during traumatic experiences of Keira, who I am sure is a wonderful and non-violent person ?
Dimitri-Nutt
wirt wrote:
My thanks, Dimitri. I'm getting my first ever guitar lesson tonight, so if Keira doesn't bludgeon me to death with my own guitar for playing like a demented orangutan I might have something else to write about ?
Note: Said bludgeoning is a reflection on my terrible playing, and not of the patience and skill at remaining calm during traumatic experiences of Keira, who I am sure is a wonderful and non-violent person ?
Hahahaha ?
I'm sure that you're going to do quite fine. Everyone had to start at the beginning at some point in their lives and it is certainly no different with Keira I'd imagine.
As you stated in one of your previous posts, "practice makes permanent" and to be a teacher, I'd guess that lots of practice has taken place and therefore a lot of patience was built.
domhatch
wirt wrote:
My thanks, Dimitri. I'm getting my first ever guitar lesson tonight, so if Keira doesn't bludgeon me to death with my own guitar for playing like a demented orangutan I might have something else to write about ?
Note: Said bludgeoning is a reflection on my terrible playing, and not of the patience and skill at remaining calm during traumatic experiences of Keira, who I am sure is a wonderful and non-violent person ?
i've only ever met keira twice in person, but heard her play quite often. i think you're quite safe, and you've picked yourself a great teacher by all reckoning. looking forward to the next installment:
your chapter 4 - get yerself a great teacher, and leech everything you can.
good luck
dh
wirt
Chapter 4: You ain't seen sucking yet.
========================
I had the pleasure of getting my second lesson last night. One thing is immediately apparent: The first item on my list in Chapter 2 should have been, in big red shiny letters, GET LESSONS! There are so many damned things that I would never have known I'm doing wrong if I wasn't sitting there with a guru's watchful eyes picking up on my bad technique. There is nothing worse than having to revisit things you thought you could do and re-learning it. Worth it, but not nice. Two months ago someone (too lazy to look it up now) told me to get a tutor and I thought it simply wasn't worth it yet (for some silly reason) and I regret that so much right now. I basically spent 3 months learning to do all the right things in all the wrong ways. Also just having someone that knows his/her shit there telling you what to practice and how is invaluable. Learning on my own felt like traversing a maze without a map, making near-random decisions about where to go next. There are any amount of guitar techniques to master and having someone telling you what's important and which areas you need to work on right now feels like it's saving me a butload of time.
Anyway, here's a list of things I do wrong:
- Playing too softly.
- Not playing at a constant, deliberate (not fast) tempo.
- Not muting at all. I'm most worried about this right now. I've practiced this last with just playing chromatic scales and trying to mute up the strings I weren't playing and the mental leap to do it while playing is massive. I either mute well and play like a drunken leper or play well and don't mute at all. I guess it's just practice and hoping I get it right eventually.
- I still Fumble the odd note, to my shame.
Things I do right:
- I sometimes remember to breath while playing scales.
- Haven't drooled on anyone yet.
- Have not yet mistaken guitar for giant candy-bar.
On the theory side of things I'm quite happy. Music is a language. I think learning a song would be the equivalent of learning your "Habla no Espanol"s and so on. It might get you by, but if you want to express yourself you're going to have to learn the grammar and get the vocabulary. I'm not there yet by a long shot, but it kinda feels like being in a foreign city and picking recognizing a word or two from a take-away restaurant menu or being able to swear at the locals in their language. Progress always give me a warm glow in the pit of my stomach. ?
Malcolm Gladwell has a fair amount of pages dedicated to the idea of "10,000 Hours" in his book "Outliers". Basically it says that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master something, whether it be programming, playing an instrument or playing a sport like Hockey. He gives a number of examples in the book and while that doesn't make it hard science (or even accurate), it certainly does make for an interesting hypothesis. He goes on to mention a couple of things that can speed up this process to make the hours you put in more efficient like surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals hoping to achieve the same thing, building good habits and most importantly: getting a coach. I should have gotten one months ago.
