Hi and some advice

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by hayvis

With hex cores, the wrap wire grips to the edges and doesn't unravel. With round cores there's nothing to grip to so the wrap wire can literally unravel if you cut it. Once you've got the strings to tension then the wind at the machine head keeps any unravelling caused by cutting from the playable part of the string.

OK, thanks. I never cut my strings until I have them up to pitch anyway.
But it doesn't explain TBMan's leaving them overnight.

[tonyo]

Originally Posted by Methos1979

Here are some tips from what worked best for me:

1.) Have fun. For me that meant playing songs. Now that you've got your chord changes down smooth, go online and find a good tab site and pick a few simple songs that you know and love and learn them. Playing scales, while important, was a killer for me. It wasn't until I actually started playing songs that I had the motivation to improve.

2.) Play with a metronome. That, or play along with the recorded song. I was lucky in that I had built-in time keeping abilities as I'd been a drummer my whole life. But I can't tell you how many people I've run into that are learning to play and make decent strides but can't play in time.

3.) As soon as possible, form a band. This is an offset of tip #1 above. Even if it's only one other person playing and/or singing it becomes more fun and you'll get better that much faster.

4.) Always leave your guitar out in a place where you spend a lot of time - if you can. You'll be way more likely to pick it up and playing if it's staring at you. For me that meant in the living room. Then even late at night if I was watching TV alone I could pick it up and strum lightly and get practice while watching TV. If my guitar was in its case in another room it was less likely that I'd get it out to play it. In some instances this might be hard to do if you've got small children or destructive pets around.

5.) Don't fear the bar chord - or the F chord. I learned to play the F chord (finally) when I played it as a bar chord and then that led to being able to play just about any bar chord out there and all its variations.

Those would be my tips of what worked well for me. The one thing that really took my playing to new levels was giving up the pick and playing fingerstyle but that's because I was never good with a pick - it just never felt right. Once I started playing with a pick - boom, it clicked.

Great answer. Answer 1 was the critical one for me. Tried to learn years ago and teachers taught scales far far far too early. Tried it again 7 years ago and my goal was learn to play a song that people could sing along to. Found a campfire version of Blowin in the Wind, learning that gave me so much motivation.

Barre chords, I stuck with them from day one and the dreaded F barre sounded crap for several months. Then it got better and better and I'm so glad I stuck it out. Have friends who've been playing for 5 and longer years and they still can't do the F barre, it holds them back from so many songs with F and Bm etc.

Answer 4 is also a great one. Having a guitar handy to play at all times. It's become a way of life now. My wife has many times said how glad she is that I decided to pick up the guitar.

[TBman]

Originally Posted by JonPR

OK, thanks. I never cut my strings until I have them up to pitch anyway.
But it doesn't explain TBMan's leaving them overnight.

Just because

No other reason.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by TBman

Just because

No other reason.

OK, sounds reasonable!

Same reason, I guess, why (back in the 60s/70s) I used to curl the ends of my strings into loops instead of trimming them, because I thought it looked cool, which was because I'd seen a photo of Paul Simon where he'd done that.
Probably this one, or one from the same period:


Funnily enough, I notice there he's playing a Guild F30. That's not the reason I bought one in 1974, however. That was because it was a Guild and was cheaper than the D40. I wasn't that much of a Simon fan...

As you'll see in this 1979 photo of me demonstrating my fingerpickin' technique on the F30, I was still curling those string ends.... Paul Simon, eat your heart out.

(Nope, no photoshop trickery. Just the arm of a dummy. Along with the two arms of the other dummy of course .)