Starting over at 60

[TDavis]

I “started” to learn to play the guitar 4-5 times earlier in my life, but never found the discipline to practice & get past the sore fingers and 3-chord stage. Well, life has progressed and I find myself hitting the 60-year mark, and with a fresh motivation & desire to play...and learn to play well, or at least well enough not to embarrass myself.

Any other late-adopters here who have started...or started again like I have, at 60-years old or older? What is your story as to why you waited? How easy is it for you now?

[turbotom1052]

I like you have had numerous false starts with the guitar over the years, and never stuck with it, because of either time availability, or discouragement with my slow progress. After becoming disabled at 56 and forced into an early retirement I found myself lacking the no time excuse. I just turned 60 and have managed to find the time to practice, and although progress is not as fast as I would like, its definitely happening. This forum has been a great inspiration to me and has also sold me on the need for a professional setup for my style of playing. My recently purchased Santa Cruz has become a joy to play after getting it set up and allows me to actually practice for longer than a half hour at a time without putting the guitar down from sore fingertips. Now if I could just learn to work past the arthritis in my hands that shuts down my playing after around an hour!!!

[Nyghthawk]

I started over again on guitar in October of 2013 when I was 57. I have found guitars have vastly improved so far as the quality of instrument I can afford and the internet has made finding the right chords and learning to play much easier. Go for it!

[rmgjsps]

Originally Posted by davistld01

I “started” to learn to play the guitar 4-5 times earlier in my life, but never found the discipline to practice & get past the sore fingers and 3-chord stage. Well, life has progressed and I find myself hitting the 60-year mark, and with a fresh motivation & desire to play...and learn to play well, or at least well enough not to embarrass myself.

Any other late-adopters here who have started...or started again like I have, at 60-years old or older? What is your story as to why you waited? How easy is it for you now?

I first started playing in the 1960s during the "Folk Revival" and played up into my 50s. When we moved to San Francisco (I was 51,) I gave my guitar to a neighbor who was, retiring and hadn't played since he was a boy.

Well, I didn't decide to start playing again until about two years ago at 69. I'm 71 now and happy beyond words that I started playing again. The only downside is that in addition to any other health issues, I may have, I suffer greatly from GAS -- i'm up to five, and am running out of space in a very small San Francisco house. Well maybe that 12-striung I've been jonesing for ...

Just play, don't worry about your age. Play what you like, learn what you want and don't look back. The rewards are much greater that the pain of forming new callouses and the frustration of struggling to learn that lick that has been eluding you.

[Kindness]

At 57 I am also a late adopter! I started playing in 2008. I played on and off. I took the last five years off, and have come back fresher and my skills are actually a whole lot better on the guitar now. Glad to be back at it!

[FThomas]

I played as a teenager and was in a band formed from the local high school musicians = think Earth Wind and Fire. Then I ended up joining the Army and flying helicopters and all things music kind of ended. Fast forward lots of years and I picked it back up at 63 and have got a couple of years under my belt. Loving it.

[raysachs]

I'm in a little different situation because I did play a lot as a kid, started when I was 18 and played a ton through my mid-20s and a fair amount into my late 20s until family and career got in the way and I played almost not at all for about 30 years. I'd sort of get into it for a month or two a couple of times in those years, but never really stayed with it long enough to get back to any sort of level of proficiency.

I started getting waaaaay back into it early last year, so I'm nearly two years into it again and I'm loving it. I was a really limited player when I was a kid - a lot of three chord rock and blues, and I'm much more of an electric player than acoustic. But I had a basic level of knowledge and proficiency, so I wasn't starting totally from scratch. When I started again, I was rusty beyond belief, had seemingly managed to forget more than I'd ever known in the first place, and had the tenderist of finger-tips. But it came back fairly quickly. I'd say within 3-4 months I was as good as I'd ever been and I've gotten somewhat better since, or at least I've learned more, so I'm similarly mediocre at a larger set of skills.

There's more information and easily available instruction out there now than there ever has been, with free stuff on youtube and more structured pay-for lessons online. And cheap to mid-priced guitars are soooooo much better now than they were back in the 70s and 80s. So it's easy to get a decent instrument (or two, or five!) for not a lot of money.

So get a decent guitar that's set up well - it'll be a lot easier on your sore fingers than the barbed wire set a half inch off of the fretboard that I learned on 40 years ago. And maybe start off with a few lessons or go online. But the main thing is to start simple. Just learn the basic open chords - A through G with a few minors tossed in there for good measure. Learn a basic scale or two - the pentatonic is a really easy place to start - it's the same fingering in both major and minor iterations so it's pretty easy to get started with it. And practice to get better but once you can play three chords reasonably competently, don't forget to just PLAY. So many of the great songs of the last 50 years are three or four easy chords. And it can be a lot of fun and very musical to just strum a nice chord progression and come up with your own rhythms. It can be about getting better but it's also supposed to be fun - that's why they call it PLAYING.

So don't neglect that part - strive to get better but also enjoy where you are! I've learned all sorts of chord voicings all over the neck in the past year and a half and I can even sort of use them now, but sometimes, there's nothing more purely enjoyable than just picking up my acoustic guitar and playing the D, C (or Am), and G chords. Let 'em ring, lift and/or hammer a finger or two and see what some of the suspensions of those chords sound like. You can just about play a whole melody with an open D, just by adding the pinky on the third fret of the high E string, and/or by lifting your ring or pointer fingers off of the first or third string and let those ring open. Even at the most rudimentary level you can still be musical, which is really the whole point. I'll never forget my AHA moment - I was literally weeks into playing a really cheap pawnshop acoustic guitar that was a really terrible piece of junk. Someone had showed me the simplest form of the minor pentatonic scale in one position. A Bob Marley song came on and I started playing around within those five very basic notes (I guess I got lucky and it happened to be in the one key I knew where to play that in). And just by playing little two or three note phrases I found I was actually making sounds that seemed somehow like MUSIC to me. Dead simple, not impressive in any sense, but it sounded like music and I was creating it. One of the great moments of my life and it's let to so many million more basically just like it ever since. So find those moments and savor them even as you work to keep getting better and learning more.

[HeyMikey]

Davis, You are not alone. A lot of folk here are in the same boat. I started back up a year ago st 59 after a 30+ year hiatus. Used to play electric only. Now focusing on acoustic and really loving it.

After a year the calluses are still not fully there yet. One product recommended here that helps a bit is Rock Tips liquid calluses.

Also a lot of older players like myself are finding smaller bodied guitars (OO or OOO/OM) more comfortable to play due to arthritis and other shoulder pain. Plenty very good inexpensive models to get started on these days. This forum is a wealth of information.

YouTube has some excellent free beginner and intermediate lessons out there to help you get started or in conjunction with a local or online teacher.

Enjoy and beware of GAS.

[Rev Roy]

I didn’t start playing until I retired at 63. I’m 67 now and still loving the journey. I play for a couple of hours every day. It’s been a challenge...but that’s exactly why I took it up. I still suck...but as my wife kindly points out, I don’t suck as bad as I used to.

[mercy]

I am 72 and had a long break raising my family but I got back to it maybe 15 yrs ago so not exactly your scenario but Im glad I did get back. So with that experience Ill say a few things. It takes time, get a teacher but not just any teacher. It has to be one that works for you. Get a setup.

[Twolefthands]

I started to play for the first time ever just over 16 months ago and am 53.

Two things that greatly helped me were to block book a course of 10 lessons with a proper teacher as I had no idea at all what to do.
I would also strongly suggest a Yamaha C4O Classical to use while you get used to what you are doing the best £120 I have ever spent, it sounds fantastic and is very good value for money.

I continued with my lessons for 40 weeks and have now gone down the 'going solo' route as I can now read music and have confidence in what I should be doing.

I am enjoying the journey and have obtained a Seagull S6 (steel string) to expand my skill set and things to learn. I play for sheer joy and have no ambitions to play live but to just enjoy the hobby for what it is fun.

[Guitars+gems]

I'm over 60 and rebooted 3 years ago after over 30 years off. Being retired has a lot to do with having the time to devote to guitar, although it would have been a great stress reliever while I was still working. I was just busy with kids and family and work and school. About 12 years before I retired I got involved with a different, consuming hobby.

The sore fingertips pass quickly, after a month, maybe? Take care to play everyday even for just 10 or 15 minutes at a time, be sure you have a nice low set up and light stings. I have found that it takes me longer now to get stuff from my brain to my fingers and I need more repetitions to get anything on the fretboard into muscle memory, but it does happen, and it's getting better now. My teacher said at the beginning that my brain works well and it's just a matter of getting my hands to catch up. That observation has kept me going at times when I was frustrated.

Music theory is something I never knew anything about but I enjoy learning it now. Figuring out songs out by ear is fun, and I can play any I IV V song, although my best work is always in the key of G. I like to experiment with chord progressions and find melodies based on the notes in the chords. I've learned scales and the pentatonic patterns and that is helping me know where to go on the fretboard to get the note I want. I'm working on inversions and arpeggio patterns now. The Play and Write page is super valuable to me.

Just stay at it and take satisfaction in every little thing you learn. Learn to play a song you like and play it everyday, getting it better all the time. That way you'll be assured that you can actually play. Pick the guitar up daily. Soon, time will pass and you'll realize that you are a guitar player after all!

[Long Road Home]

As you can see, you're not alone. I started playing in my teens, and stayed with it through my college years, where I started a campus coffee house. I then discovered that I had nowhere to play for an audience and got bored.

Over the next 35+ years, I had a few false starts , getting together with other players for short periods of time. To be honest, the thought of suffering through the process of re-growing calluses didn't appeal to me, so my guitar mainly stayed in its case (yes, I only had one guitar). Mostly, life took over, with career and family obligations taking precedence.

Three years ago (at the age of 60), I discovered AGF and decided that I was going to get back to it. It's been a great ride. Between discovering what shape, scale, nut width and woods work best for me, and taking vocal lessons, music has once again become a big part of my life. I have been fortunate to discover a thriving music community in my area. I do 3-4 open mics a month, and our band will be doing our first show in late November.

Do I wish that I had kept going, or re-started 20 years ago? Sure, but I'm enjoying this too much to have any real regrets.

[Cowtown]

My experience is similar to the above tales. Beginning in HS I was three chord pounder, born of the 60's folk revival. Today I'm 67, retired in '09, had the time to learn to do more. Found a good teacher who was closer to my age than a lot of others. My advice:

1.) Get a decent guitar, one that says "Pick me up and play me!"

2.) Decide what type(s) of music you want to play. As in, do you want to be a flat-picker or a finger style player? If you want door no. 1, learn to play the pluck-strum style rather than just strumming. It's hard to go back if you don't start that way, and one day you'll want to. If you want door no. 2, learn Travis style.

3.) Find a good teacher, one who plays your stuff. One you can want to play like. And most importantly, one who can show you how to play what you like.

4.) To learn to play up the neck, learn the "Caged system" and the pentatonic scales.

5.) Make the time to practice but don't always just "practice." Play the songs that made you want to do this in the first place.

Have fun. :-)

[TDavis]

I sang in 10-12 mostly hard rock bands in my high school years and several years thereafter, a couple of those bands had limited success, but never went any further. I was around guitars and players for years, and because of that I absorbed a lot of information about guitars...good and bad, but never learned the instrument past rudimentary chords.

My recent history is odd...but I felt like if I was going to do this I didn't want to waste time on some old $100 guitar from a pawn shop, so I set out to buy the nicest guitar I could find...and since that first one, I developed a sudden case of GAS...and I've bought, sold & traded my way through 8-10 Martin & Taylor guitars, settling on one (00-18) I have now. Yes...I still want every Martin I see, but I'm forcing myself to settle down with this amazing little guitar until I'm proficient enough to actually deserve another, or more.

This forum has been a great education to me. And, it's kept me interested past those days of being a little disappointed with my progression. I plan on keeping it up, keeping on playing & learning...

-Terry