The YouTube channels recommendation thread

[teedoff]

One thing that will help you a lot is to learn the "Segovian Scales." They're really just regular major and minor scales over 2-3 octaves. And once you learn the patterns, you can move them up and down the neck to do all of the scales. Pretty much every classical guitar student learns these as a way of training to fingerpick with their right hands, but they're just as useful with using a guitar pick. It will develop your ear as well. I'd print this PDF out and practice them. It has sheet music (which is something great to learn), but it also has the tabs and left-hand fingering charts which will get you to start learning them right away.

http://www.psstrings.com/uploads/2/4...via_scales.pdf

If you don't own a metronome, there are plenty of free ones you can download. It will save you a lot of time and headaches to just get used to practicing with a metronome from the beginning.

Thanks for the link and the tips. I have "some" musical background, though I've forgotten most of what I learned. I played sax from 6th grade to 11th grade in school.

I've been trying to work on scales as well. Let's face it, they're kinda boring at first, but once you start learning them well, and what you can do with them, they open up a lot of stuff. And as you said, they work your hands and finger muscles which I really need.

Strumming patterns are also tough to learn for me. Lol

There's a music shop like a mile from me and i inquired about taking lessons there. The guy that teaches there was going through cancer treatment and has had to cancel the last 3 lessons we had scheduled. So I've yet to even get in there once.

I've been practicing almost every night for a month, but I'm one that needs the structure of lessons. What exactly to practice and how long. Otherwise, I get sidetracked. I'll be practicing chords or scales, and then I'll think of a song that might be easier to learn and I'm off finding tutorials for it.

I have a mid level Ibanez acoustic electric I've owned for years, but also picked up an epiphone les paul a few weeks ago.

[Honkey_Kong]

Thanks for the link and the tips. I have "some" musical background, though I've forgotten most of what I learned. I played sax from 6th grade to 11th grade in school.

I've been trying to work on scales as well. Let's face it, they're kinda boring at first, but once you start learning them well, and what you can do with them, they open up a lot of stuff. And as you said, they work your hands and finger muscles which I really need.

Strumming patterns are also tough to learn for me. Lol

There's a music shop like a mile from me and i inquired about taking lessons there. The guy that teaches there was going through cancer treatment and has had to cancel the last 3 lessons we had scheduled. So I've yet to even get in there once.

I've been practicing almost every night for a month, but I'm one that needs the structure of lessons. What exactly to practice and how long. Otherwise, I get sidetracked. I'll be practicing chords or scales, and then I'll think of a song that might be easier to learn and I'm off finding tutorials for it.

I have a mid level Ibanez acoustic electric I've owned for years, but also picked up an epiphone les paul a few weeks ago.

I used to go with either a record, cassette or CD and play little clips of of songs over and over and try to figure out how to play it on the guitar. Learn it in parts. If they were doing a trick in it, it'd take days sometimes or weeks to get the hang of it.

Kind of just mess around and try to figure out, not necessarily how whichever artist's song you want to learn played it, but instead how you would play it.

Like for instance I'm a huge Gary Moore fan. He's got this song "One Day" which is pretty cool. It's not exactly difficult to play it the way he did. But he's also got a band backing him right? So what if I would play some of the bass notes with my thumb and the melody with my index, middle and ring fingers? I listen to a few bars a bunch of times and hear what's going on. Then just jot it down. I'll use a program like Guitar Pro 7, but you could do it with paper if you'd like. And you kind of learn the song as you're writing it down.



That's how it looks so far.