guitars

As someone who has been playing for 30 years, the best advice I can give you is that it's way more important to play it correctly than it is to play it fast. You're naturally going to want to rush and cut corners to try and make the thing sound like the thing as quickly as possible, but it's in your best interest to fight that urge, slow down, and focus on accuracy.

The vast majority of what you're doing when you're learning guitar (or any other instrument) is programming muscle memory. That only happens through repetition, and it's a very garbage in/garbage out process. If what you repeat the most is clean accurate movement and good technique, then that's what's going to become automatic. If what you repeat the most is sloppy, rushed, and full of mistakes, then that's what's going to become automatic.

This isn't to say that you're not allowed to make mistakes. You're going to make tons, and you don't really need to beat yourself up about it. Just notice when it's happening and then slow down and really focus on breaking down the movements and playing it cleanly and correctly. Once you can do it perfectly playing slow, then you can start speeding up again. I don't know if you've ever heard the saying, "slow is smooth and smooth is fast," or, "you have to slow down to speed up," but there's nowhere it's more true than in guitar playing. A huge portion of what makes up speed on guitar isn't just physically moving faster, it's accuracy and economy of movement.

Other than that, spend time practicing with a metronome. There are some good free ones you can download on your phone. It will help a lot in developing an accurate sense of rhythm, but just as importantly it will help train you to follow external cues while playing. This will be massively helpful later on when you're jamming with other musicians.

Also, as much as possible, keep your guitar in tune, and tuned to a consistent pitch. Having that consistency will help develop your ear for recognizing pitch, and will make trying to learn songs by ear a lot easier later on.

Scales.

There are a lot of great comments here about practice and having fun and nice guitar.

You want to learn how to play?

SCALES.

On the guitar there are chord scales and single note scales.

Learn them all. Especially chord scales.

Your goal should be to pick up the guitar and freely play it, and I'm not talking about a song, what I mean is if I say play me a blues riff in e minor you should be able to do that!

Memorizing the entire fret board, although I massive chore is one of the best fundamentals you'll ever learn!

In addition to dedicated lessons, remember to just play around and have fun too. You don't want to turn it into a chore. Spending some time diving in blind can be a lot of fun and a great learning experience as well.

I highly recommend you learn some theory and get a teacher if possible. That will accelerate your ability to learn new songs and will help if you ever want to write your own. A Circle of fifths wheel is probably the easiest way to understand the basics of what's going on. They are like $10 on amazon. Scales, arpeggios, licks, and patterns are also super useful. The more pattern recognition you can develop the more you can improve as a player. Unfortunately, effective practice is often much more boring than practicing the songs you love.

Nice guitar! It's not really an advice, but good luck, it's really really challenging (if you're a complete beginner).

No amp is totally fine to start, and it's better to practice unplugged and save up for the best amp you can buy for your needs.

My advice is to do the learning on Justin Guitar, and the fun practice on Rocksmith. If you can, find some local peeps that are also starting to learn and that will accelerate your learning big-time.

Nice guitar! I started with rocksmith 2014 (or Rocksmith 2 if you will) and learned many songs that I love to play to this day. Once you get your fingers working you' can hop on to youtube and follow some tutorials.

By the way don't neglect the rhythm or lead guitar even if you prefer one. You'll get better by switching every now and then.

Remember you don't have to play perfect to have fun!

aye she's a keeper i'd say

advice is, find an artist you like and study him like he's your sensei.. Jeff Beck, Jimmy Paige, Stevie Ray, Joe Walsh, whoever makes you think "oh man, how do i make this thing do THAT"..

She's a beauty, better looking than my first one. Just one point no one has raised before (maybe it's headstock confusing me) - if you're left handed, you might want to tape some of those knobs (and especially the wire, with extra padding) in place, or you're gonna keep hitting them and the jack - you can definitely use the switch-handedness to do such cool volume/tone sweeps, but if you notice you're constantly hitting the knobs unintentionally, lots of people tape them.

Also like some commented to an extent, you don't need an amp, especially if you have a smartphone or a basic computer - you can test out a lot more options and figure out what kind of a sound you like if you get whatever type of stuff you need to get to connect your guitar to a computer. Tons of professionals don't even use amps and instead use virtual amp models. You can do so much if you can just connect your guitar to a computer or smart phone.

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