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#1
04-24-2020, 01:32 PM
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Is There Any Hope for Me..?
Hi guys, first post here.
(Moderators, please feel free to move this thread if there is a more appropriate place for it) Just wondering if there’s any hope for me (given the screwed up nature of my acquisition of my guitar skills) to improve and become a competent player. Let me explain. I have started basic guitar lessons at least three separate times in my life while very young. I’ve gotten through reading and playing all the notes at the nut of the guitar at least a dozen times. But each time I’ve given up after a few months deciding that I wanted to play the guitar and make music for fun, not for more tedious work that just felt like extra homework I voluntarily took on. But... I LOVE music. So at some point in my “development” I just grabbed my guitar, sat down in front of my record player/tape player/cd player/iTunes depending on what decade we’re talking about, and played... I learned actual songs by ear, shared songs with friends... enjoyed myself. Got an electric, got an amp, started some simple playing rock. Just then, Tablature appeared. It was like magic! Suddenly I could play just about anything I wanted. All it took was some dedication, patience, and practice. Around that time I fell in love with Van Halen, started learning and playing all their stuff... and I have to say, I really got pretty good at it! But the tragic story is this. Flash forward 25 years or so. I still love the guitar. I can still play a half dozen songs pretty well from memory. I’m sure I could sit down with some tablature and copy a new song if I wanted to... BUT... Because of my dependence on tabs growing up and leaning, all I can do is copy songs I’ve heard. I can’t jam with a group of friends, I can’t really “pick up” a song unless someone sits next to me and shows me every note and position. I can’t freestyle solo with a piece of music. I can’t really do anything! So, I’m trying to try again, but I find myself unsure of where to begin, and I’m wondering if anyone has any advice. The guitar feels like home to me. I can play it, I enjoy it. I have good technique, I have good finger dexterity, I have an excellent feel for music, and I WANT TO PLAY AND IMPROVE! But if I have to re-learn E F G on the first string from Mel Bay #1 again, I’m going to suffer a relapse of my experience as a nine year old and throw it all away again. Is there any other way to lean music theory, learn to improvise and solo, to learn pentatonics without boring myself to tears? Am I just too lazy to play the guitar? I throw myself on the mercy of the forum for help. Feel free to hurl a few deserved jeers and insults along the way. I’m sure I deserve it! Cheers! QGF 
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#2
04-24-2020, 08:07 PM
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There is just a little bit of chord theory that could probably help you a lot in reaching your goals. Yeah, I know, theory, you either love it or hate it. But this is a case where just a little that you could learn pretty quickly would pay big dividends! What I'm talking about would help you in figuring out the chords to songs on your own, and jamming with others. For instance, once you determine what key a song is in you will immediately have a really good idea of the chords that are probably used in the song, or if you're jamming with friends and they say "It's in G, and it's 1, 5, m6, 4, you'll know what they mean and what chords to use.
This all starts with simply learning the major scale - as in what does it mean that it's a major scale, and how to you play it. This is pretty much the basis for everything else. From there you can learn how all of the chords for a given key are made. This translates to you being able to use this little bit of knowledge to "hear" what's going on in a song and know what chords to play.
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#3
04-24-2020, 08:13 PM
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The other piece of this puzzle is to learn how to play various chords on the guitar, so, for instance, if you know you need to play an F#m you'll know how you can play it. The theory piece combined with a little knowledge on various ways to play all of the chords (as difficult as it sounds, it's not really that bad once you realize that most of the chord shapes/patterns are moveable) should get you where you want to be.
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#4
04-24-2020, 08:33 PM
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I learned by hanging around with better players. struggling to keep up on occasion an learning from my mistakes. I can barely read a lick as far as reading music on a guitar goes, but I did have five years of formal training on a piano in my youth - I'm sure that helps. Tab is very helpful for me if I can;t figure out a tune I'm trying to learn by ear, but for the most part I can play rhythm and keep up with folks who are better players than me.
As to your original question - heck no, there's no hope for you. You're here, aren't you? You're gonna get addicted to this forum like all the rest of us. And welcome to the forum!
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McCawber “We are all bozos on this bus." 1967 D-28 (still on warranty) / 1969 homemade Mastertone / 1977 OME Juggernaught / 2003 D-42 / 2006 HD-28V burst / 2010 Little Martin / 2012 Custom Shop HD-28V / 2014 Taylor 356ce 12 / 2016 Martin D-28 Authentic Last edited by Kerbie; 04-25-2020 at 03:06 AM. Reason: Not allowed.
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#5
04-24-2020, 11:35 PM
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If you were sitting next to me, I would teach you one major scale, one minor scale, and maybe the blues scale. Learn those and you'll be able to solo to many chord progressions.
As you get better, your solo will make more sense musically. Best of luck, Su
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#6
04-25-2020, 12:05 AM
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In the spirit of giving you a range of ideas to consider ... how about taking some piano lessons?
I’m pretty new to guitar — so can’t lean on 25 years of finger training. I’m still having to spend a lot of time getting my fingers to go to the right place at the right time with the right touch. But I did play other instruments in my first two decades of life and that background has been a huge help on guitar. Piano in particular is the “Latin” of the musical world. Learn a bit of piano, along with the theory that goes with it, and it unlocks all kinds of new musical skills (even and maybe especially if piano isn’t your primary instrument). Anyways — wondering if you have considered picking up some keyboard skills? A little bit will go a long way. Once you’ve done that, you may have a lot more enthusiasm and use for learning scales and theory on guitar.
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#7
04-25-2020, 02:59 AM
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Quote:
It's that syndrome of thinking we have 25 years playing experience but in reality it's more like we've had one year's experience 25 times over! So don't beat yourself up about it - just start from where you are. We've all been stuck in that rinse and repeat cycle for periods. You say you can't jam with a group of friends. So lets just work on that. My first deserved jeer and insult coming your way (well second if you count the one about experience) is just how much time have you spent jamming with friends or playing in a band compared to learning stuff off TAB on your own? Learning to jam along with others takes practice in....jamming along and getting it wrong. You say you have a good feel for music - Lets put that to work and give you some friends to jam along with. Here they are: Start with the rhythm - always start with the rhythm. Just mute your strings with your left hand and provide percussion with the right hand strums. Play around with rhythms and syncopation. (if you don't know a song in a jam session I have often seen folks flip their guitar over and hand drum it with great effect!). Now the key - Ask someone - Its in A they tell you. (G capo 2). What chords you ask - They say it's a repeating pattern - 1, 5, 6m, 4, then 1, 5, 4, As in SRbell post above the chord sequence at jams is often given in numbers not names. In its simplest form the 1, 4 and 5 chords and always major and the 2 and 6 chords always minor. This will cover around 80% of all popular tunes. You can see I've picked a tune that follows SRbell's example sequence in his post of 1, 5, 6m, 4. So for this jam along you are going to play from the open G shape capo at fret 2. G (1), D (5), Em (6m), C (4) then G (1), D (5), C (4). Just play along to the video for a few rounds. OK - so you are pretty much playing what the guitarist in the band is playing. So what could you do differently that would add to the overall sound? Perhaps you could play chord arpeggios fingerstyle or crosspicked. Or capo way up the neck and play different inversions of the chords in mandolin style chops. Can you find little riffs and fills to play? Try some stuff out. This band won't mind if you get it wrong!!!! Now how about those lead breaks the violin is doing? Can you find them, or something close that will work on guitar? Have a go. And that is how jamming with friends goes. There is some very basic chord theory and some very basic scales for leads (as Bluestarfish said). But beyond that it is a matter of practice in the moment. If you put some time into jamming along with youtube or CD tracks you'll find yourself naturally hearing patterns and becoming more creative so when you do meet up with friends to jam you are not totally lost. You say you were good at learning stuff by ear (until you caught the dreaded TAB disease). So go back to that and enjoy yourself.
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I'm learning to flatpick and fingerpick guitar to accompany songs. I've played and studied traditional noter/drone mountain dulcimer for many years. And I used to play dobro in a bluegrass band. Last edited by Robin, Wales; 04-25-2020 at 04:10 AM.
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#8
04-25-2020, 08:44 AM
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My own experience may not help, but here it is anyway. I actually learned notation in school music classes. Everybody did back then. I wasn't interested in music at all then. Fast forward 3 or 4 years, and I get obsessed with guitar. I start teaching myself from a simple tutor book. No tab, not even much notation, just chord symbols and a few simple progressions. BUT... (1) My best friends at school are all amateur musicians, and (secretly) I want to get up to their speed. I want to learn songs. Mostly folk and blues in those days, nothing technically challenging. No fancy lead guitar work. I don't even know what a "solo" is. Some of these songs are in songbooks. Because I can read notation, that makes it easy to learn to play the tunes, even if I've never heard the tunes before. (I can't sing, but I like melodies. So I play melodies.) I buy a book of 100 folk songs, very few of which I've actually heard. But I play my way through the lot. I also buy (or borrow) songbooks by my favourite bands and singers. (2) Guitar is my new toy. So I play with it. That means I write my own tunes. I mean, why wouldn't you? I mess around and find things that sound good. No one tells me I can't. Of course, the fact I know notation means I can write them down. (I still have my first manuscript book, which reminds me that I wrote four tunes in the first week I owned the guitar.) But if I couldn't have done that, I could have (in fact often did) record them on tape to help memorise them. (I might even have invented some kind of tab system if I'd needed to.) Obviously, I'm a beginner, so these songs are all crap. That's not the point. When you first ride a bike, you probably fall over. When you first try swimming you probably flail around a bit and swallow some water. But the more you do it, the better you get. You still might not get to be an Olympic athlete, but you get confident and competent. I don't realise it at the time, but this is my musical education. IOW, I don't do all this in order to "improve", I do it because I enjoy it. None of it is difficult. I don't mean I'm "talented", I'm not. (My school music teacher would definitely have filed me under "untalented.") Does a child find playing "difficult"? No, the question doesn't arise. Some "play" is definitely intense and highly involving, highly complex and detailed. But as long as it's fun, it's not "difficult". It's not "work". I approached guitar in a diametrically opposite direction to "school". School was where I had to go, in order to be taught stuff that didn't interest me, and which I didn't really learn. If anyone had offered me guitar lessons I'd have run a mile. "Guitar" was the opposite of "school". No one was going to teach me guitar; how could anyone know how I wanted to do it? 9 months after I got my first guitar, my friends asked me to join their band. Not because they thought I was good - they just needed a bass player, and I was the nearest person. Bass was easier than guitar, so no problem there. We started playing in public within a month. We all improvised solos (it was still just basic blues and 3-chord folk), which was easy becuase we just made it sound something like the records. Using the chords and riffs to make up new stuff from. The notes are all there under your fingers when you play the chords, so you just use that stuff to mess around with. I think I probably knew what a "major scale" was, but I didn't know any other theory. I didn't need to. I knew the songs. As with the compositions, I improvised because nobody told me I couldn't. Nobody told me I needed to know a whole load of stuff before I could do it. No doubt I wasn't very good. But there was no mystery about the process or the principles. No magic formulas. The rules were all evident from the records. IOW, I was learning the language by ear. My sense of melodic phrasing came mainly from all those songbooks I'd read, as well the records I listened to. I learned about rhythm, swing, tone, accent and so from the records alone. I wanted to "sound like that", so that's what I tried to do. If there's a moral to all this, I guess it's just: listen and copy. That's how you learn music in the end. Theory (and reading tab or notation) can certainly help, but you have to listen and copy to really get it. As well as reading all those songbooks, I heard a lot of songs (on record or the radio) that I couldn't find in songbooks. How to learn those? I was lucky that my dad had a 2-speed tape recorder, so I could slow things to half-speed and do it note by note. When I wasn't reading songbooks (or writing songs) I'd be transcribing songs from tape. Again, just because I enjoyed it (and wanted to learn those songs), not because I wanted to "improve", or because I wanted to "train my ear". My ear got better, but that was accidental. These days, you don't need expensive and clunky old hardware like a tape recorder. You have this: https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/screenshots.html - which is cheap and does so much more. I probably use that program 2 or 3 times a day, every day, and have done for the last 15 years or so. Not always to learn whole songs, but just to check up on fragments now and then (recording from youtube or spotify). It makes the listening so much easier.
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"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen. Last edited by JonPR; 04-25-2020 at 08:53 AM.
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#9
04-25-2020, 10:02 AM
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Download some apps! All the cool kids are doing it. They don't replace a good teacher, and they certainly don't replace live jamming, but they make some things pretty painless.
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#10
04-26-2020, 08:38 AM
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Quote:
I think most people want to propel themselves around the hard stuff to just play songs, add them to their repertoires and consider themselves accomplished, in the greater sense of the word. To this end tablature and other visual aids have assisted them in bypassing their ear training. If they can't simply join a jam session by ear alone then accomplished players they are not. You have clearly stated that you also feel this way about yourself and I think admitting it is the first step towards correcting it. Listen to music, find it on the fret board and use your ears to move your hands. It's the best way to developing as a player. When you hear an unfamiliar piece of music, can quickly find the progression on the fret board and get the basic melody down within minutes you're reaping the benefits of learning your instrument by ear. It's at this point in your development that you can accompany a jam session by ear alone.
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#11
04-26-2020, 08:58 AM
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I haven't sat down and played with other people since the late 70s.
If I were to try it now I would fall on my face. I play solo finger style, write my own tunes and learn others' tunes from notation/tab. I do nothing by ear, (except my own composing). If I wanted to learn to play with others I would learn (memorize) some basic chord progressions and learn the pentatonic scales that match the key and can be played over the chords. I would also do recordings of myself playing the various progressions and then practice doing leads over them. To me, one of the problems of improvising with a group, is that the players all might have different ideas of where the improvisation is going to go. So I suppose true improvisation doesn't really exist, there has to be some planning and cooperation involved beyond "you play this and I'll play that."
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Barry My SoundCloud page Avalon L-320C, Guild D-120, Martin D-16GT, McIlroy A20, Pellerin SJ CW Cordobas - C5, Fusion 12 Orchestra, C12, Stage Traditional Alvarez AP66SB, Seagull Folk Aria {Johann Logy}:
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#12
04-26-2020, 09:53 AM
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Barry - that is a really interesting and valid perspective. I sing in a Welsh MVC and the detail of the musical structure is set and learned. I've been in concerts of 800 singers where it is so important for everything to be set in detail and rehearsed.
However, I also played dobro in a bluegrass band at completely the other end of the spectrum. I don't think I ever played the same tune the same way at any gig! Our lead guitarist/singer was notorious for ditching the set list after the first song and winging it for the rest of the evening. He would throw me solos in songs and at points I'd never played before, we would work up harmonies for acapella verses on the fly that we'd never rehearsed. And he was notorious for adding half a bar to a turnaround or chasing a tune along with a 3/4 bar in a 4/4 song. Our playing was totally in the moment, we had to watch each other all the time (we single mic'd), and it was just a totally fun and creative process. If you asked me afterward what solo I played for such and such a song in many cases I could honestly say "I have no idea, I was just following the fiddler or mandolin". Now I was certainly not a great dobro player at all - but I could do just enough and I could pitch and I could play in time. I never picked the instrument up to practice at home, just played at band rehearsals and gigs. And since the band folded I've not touched the instrument apart from to play at the funeral of one of the band members. So I do think there is a place for knowing exactly what's coming next and also a place for that 'in the moment' creativity of a pub session jam (aided by beer!). Here's an example I posted a few days ago in another thread where two folks had worked up the start to Whiskey Before Breakfast together and brought it to a pub session and just said - Lets all have ago at it! So we now have an impromptu band of 6 with various instruments (two guitars, mandolin, bass, banjo, and Galax dulcimer) and this happened - this group of players had never played the tune together before (although we all new it) and never played the tune together again. I kept the recording from this evening because it was just one of those magical moments. I think if you wanted to point to what improvisation at a jam session is (and an example of jam etiquette)- then this is an example. The OPs question was can we help them get off TAB and to the point where they could sit in with a group like this and play off-script so to speak. And I'm not too sure how to help them do that apart from just having a go.
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I'm learning to flatpick and fingerpick guitar to accompany songs. I've played and studied traditional noter/drone mountain dulcimer for many years. And I used to play dobro in a bluegrass band.
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#13
05-02-2020, 11:46 AM
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I’m in a bit of a similar situation to you, been playing since I was 13, a lot of Guitar Magazine tabs, Randy Rhoads, Eddie Van Halen etc. A bit of theory here and there. The last year, I’ve been really trying to improve fingerpicking, chordal knowledge. I just took the Tony Polecastro Fretboard Wizard course and found it really helpful in synthesizing knowledge I’d accumulated that wasn’t really organized in my mind. It’s a couple hundred bucks, but at a time you probably can’t take private lessons anyway it may be worth it.
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#14
06-27-2020, 04:27 PM
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Hey everyone!
Can’t thank you enough for all the thoughtful feedback and advice! Also great to hear from some folks who understand where I’m coming from here, and even the few who don’t! All of your perspectives are helpful, and the specific advice for many of you are all things I’m considering and hope to be able to take to heart and use to dig myself out of this hole I’ve built for myself. I think Pitar summed it up particularly well with the comment that I’m a perfect example of not knowing the fretboard by ear. That is exactly right! I’m the guy who is lost in a strange town. I can follow exact directions to get from one place in the town to another one I want to go, but the next time I want to go anywhere else in the town, I’m lost again... Anyway, sorry for how long it’s taken me to get back to this thread to say thanks, but I want to thank each of you personally for taking the time to offer your wisdom and try to help me. I’m definitely a work in progress, but thanks for helping me make just a little more of that progress with your input!
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