Taking up the Guitar

[allgonepetetong]

Guys

I have been reading Ronnie Wood's autobiography and am feeling inspired to take up the guitar. My first thought is to buy an acoustic and some instruction / teach yourself books and dvds and learn the essential's and core basics before moving on to an electric.

Is this the right way to go about it and is there anything I need to know about guitars before buying one? What should I be looking for?

Any advice and pearls of wisdom would be gratefully received.

thanks all and rock on!

[evil len]

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[allgonepetetong]

yes, after a quick browse I found a most of those - ta

[35secToNuvolari]

allgonepetetong said:

Guys

I have been reading Ronnie Wood's autobiography and am feeling inspired to take up the guitar. My first thought is to buy an acoustic and some instruction / teach yourself books and dvds and learn the essential's and core basics before moving on to an electric.

Is this the right way to go about it and is there anything I need to know about guitars before buying one? What should I be looking for?

Any advice and pearls of wisdom would be gratefully received.

thanks all and rock on!

In the beginning you have to balance out building dexterity, learning chords, and maintaining interest. Learning chords is fun and quickly gets you to playing songs you like. The dexterity is built up by continually playing what you like and always going back to the guitar to play songs again and again, or more accurately, to play parts of songs again and again.

Maintaining interest is a big deal, and listening to music, and continually finding new bands and songs you want to hear and immitate is important.

The problem with many instructional books is that you learn to read music as you learn to play the guitar. IMO, this slows one's progress and dulls one's interest. All you want to do is play the effing guitar and the books keep making you learn dots. Stick to chord charts and tabs. When you have a tab in front of you, have the song playing as well.

The reason to use an acoustic first is that it's the cheapest thing to buy, it's self-contained so it's portable, not so loud, and there are many songs that are just strummed. The downside is that it's physically more difficult to play. There are some things that you just can't play on the acoustic because it doesn't have the sustain, or the right sound when you bend notes, or limited access to the high notes, but some electric type stuff can still be played, like the intro to purple haze, gimmee shelter, etc.

As for the type of acoustic to buy, don't go bottom of the barrel, cheapo. You'll quickly become disatisfied with it. There are plenty of good guitars in the range just above cheapo/intro models. People say you gotta play 'em to find the good ones, which is true, but in the beginning you won't be able to tell which are the good ones/bad ones. Alvarez, Yamaha, Takamine all have some good ones out there.