Learning Guitar At Last

Sorry, I decided to learn off-line so haven’t been updating this blog and will not be doing so. I needed to do something which wasn’t connected to the net and the guitar is going to be that thing. Still learning on my own, slowly but surely, and still loving it!

Damn. We live in a thin walled appartment building, and while practicing for the last half hour I’ve noticed that the neighbours on the other side of the wall have turned up their stereo louder than ever, obviously to drown me out. Fair enough, I’d want to drown me out too.

So, either I don’t practice for long at weekends (during the week I can practice in the mornings while they are at work, one of the joys of working at home…), or … there is always another option … You can plug headphones into electric guitars right?

Would rather stay acoustic for now, but am pretty worried about the neighbours eating into practice time… and these things are pretty cheap!

So, having decided to ditch the teacher for now (and wait until I know a few chords that I can switch between before finding another one), I have been working out how to carry on teaching myself. The ‘Guitar for Dummies’ book is pretty good, and the DVD is on it’s way from Amazon, but I have also found some cool beginner’s videos on Youtube - firstly, the iplayguitar series (e.g. this one), really nice simple stuff in a good order, and secondly, Justin’s videos - another really nice guy with a guitar!

But which to follow?! So many options! I’ve spent all day watching random videos, playing a bit from each, and not really getting anywhere! I guess I’ll just have to pick one or two of them and see how it goes… more soon on the results. I do know that it is nice to watch this stuff rather than just reading about it though, it’s great to see how these guys hold the guitar and so on… Right, where’s that guitar?

If I was being shipped off to a desert island tomorrow and had to choose a handful of music to take with me to inspire my guitar learning, then a quick flick through my iTunes library has come up with this lot:

Mary Gauthier, Smiths, Radiohead, Turin Breaks, Snow Patrol, Simon and Garfunkel, Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Natacha Atlas, Bright Eyes, Bob Dylan, Belle & Sebastian, The Arcade Fire…

This little exercise was inspired by a comment below by Jon H:

And there’s why I question your match with the teacher. He has started you off on a typical classical guitar path, and a bit of an academic one at that. Did he ask you what you wanted out of the guitar? Did you ask yourself? [….] If I was trying to teach you, I would begin with this: “Ben, what guitar players do you like? Who are your favorite performers? Shall we try to learn a song by one of them today?. Then next week we’ll try another…”

Yes, the exercises he has given me are a bit academic and not very motivating. I just want to start learning some songs! So, I’ve got ten days to make up my mind before the next class, but I may:

a) change teacher
b) explain to him carefully what I want and see if he gets it
c) teach myself the songs I like, use fun books that get me strumming fast then go back to a teacher a bit later on once I have a bit of guitar under my belt

Confusion, confusion…. I’ll do the finger exercises he set me as I can see they are useful for getting the fingers moving over the frets, but I certainly don’t want to slave through that classical piece he gave me though, when I could be learning my first Radiohead or Mary Gauthier song instead…

Will it all sound better next week?

1. Is there a good biography of a great singer-song writer which might help me learn more about the craft?

2. Mary Gauthier took up guitar at the same age as me, 35, how inspiring is that?

3. Is there another podcast as good as All Songs Considered for finding new music?

4. Have you heard their show on the The Paste 100 Greatest Living Songwriters yet?