How to learn guitar

Far better in my opinion, is to aspire to become a better all round musician.

It's not about how fast you can talk, but rather about what you have to say.

Edited by Dayvenkirq - January 25 2016 at 11:50

Alright. Some tips.

1. Write parts you have trouble playing and play them with a click track or metronome. If you have trouble with them, play them slow. 

2. Come up with parts based on novel ideas that are idiomatic to the guitar. For instance, melodies using only harmonics. Not that that hasn't been done, but things like that help you think outside the box.

3. Stretch your improvising skills by putting some kind of limit on yourself. I did this subconsciously by starting on non-chord-tones and using as many I could just because I liked the sound. Think about limits you can place on yourself and come up with ideas in those limits.

4. Learn to play and sing at the same time. Being able to contextualize melodies with what you're playing on guitar can help your melodic ear.

5. Buy a loop station or find some way to do the following: Write a chord progression. Record and loop it. Play over it ad nauseam. Find licks you like over it. 

6. Remember that music is sound. As much as noodling and practicing unplugged by yourself helps. It helps to practice with an amp and also with other people. One thing about improvisation is that, in a band setting, it's very much about feeding off of people's ideas. If the drummer plays a triplet fill, you can play a triplet lick, or interact with it some other way. You can harmonize with the bassline. You can create crazy noises to match the energy of what the other band members are doing. 

7. Transcription. Transcribe solos, riffs, melodies, chord progressions from anything of any genre, even if it's not on guitar or guitar isn't even present in the recording. Film scores, jazz, classical, pop songs, whatever catches your ear. 

The main thing that made improvement very natural for me was that playing guitar was almost synonymous with writing songs from the outset. Before I learned any songs, I learned a few chords and arranged a chord progression out of them. I transcribed several different things (and developed good ears thereby) because I wanted to write songs with that mood or emotional resonance. I learned a good bit of theory along the way, so I knew many scale/mode names and the theory behind them, but I didn't practice scales as much as people might think because I listened to a good deal of music that was modal or in strange scales and wrote stuff based on the sound of those songs myself such that I eventually got a feel for how they laid on guitar and how to use the anyway. I wrote parts that were technically hard for me to play and improved my technique that way. I got into avant-garde music and wrote plenty of that and came back to tonal music with increased versatility. I listened to a lot of music (still do) and imitated things I heard.

But the experience I did have with one particular teacher was invaluable. My final tip: If you go looking for a teacher, look for a good jazz teacher. They'll usually have more tricks up their sleeve in terms of improvisation and soloing than a rock or classical one. (Just don't imitate their tendency to turn the tone knob all the way down ).