How to learn guitar

Polymorphia wrote: 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.

I thought about ear-training, but then I just forgot about it. They say ear-training can help you a great deal to identify intervals (maj 2nd, min 3rd, maj 6th, dim 5th, etc.) so that you can have some memory bank of reference to the root of the chord currently being played as you are playing a melody (at least that's the way I understood it). I suppose it's that natural limitation on my discipline that has kept me away from any chance of becoming a better player.

Polymorphia wrote: 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.

I used to write scale/mode degrees (instead of fret numbers) on tablature. Not that it helped me much.  But go with whatever works for you, Pascal.

Edited by Dayvenkirq - January 03 2016 at 03:03

^ I write scale degrees in a melody down so that when I go back, read, and play them I will remember what a b3 or a 5th or a b13th sounds like in that melody.

Edited by Dayvenkirq - January 03 2016 at 02:02

6th fret on A string, 5th fret on D string, 5th fret on G string, 3rd fret on B string

Eb is the flat 3rd. I put it as the bass note, thus there is no need to put it anywhere else (unless it sounds better the other way). 

Basically, this will take a minimum of 10 years, and ideally it should take the rest of your life. Oh yes, and it'll cost a lot of money.

DDPascalDD wrote: Thank you so much for taking your time! What I mostly want to do is melodic rock. Sorry for the cliche but Mr. Gilmour is my absolute favourite and influence. Though I don't want to be exactly the same, I'm not going to reach the same skill and being a copy isn't fun, but he's a big example for me.  Therefore, I think point 4) is most important for me, but I'll definitely go through them all. I got one question though: is it more useful to know a lot about chords or about scales?

^Thanks so much. I really need to pick up on learning guitar, not a lot of time lately but I really want to play better. 

Edited by DDPascalDD - March 22 2016 at 15:19

^^ I don't know if that's the case, but I used to have that kind of problem with recordings and I thought I couldn't play right but it was the recording software that was slow and added some delay. I changed the software and it was fine.

It's funny, I've been playing the guitar for 13 years (and constantly learning) but I'm spending a lot of time with keyboards lately. Like with any instrument, it requires a lot of practice and patience to become good and despite some very useful advice here, I believe there's more than one way to learn it. For me it's mainly learning songs from other artists (mostly by ear and not note by note) and going to concerts... and then assimilate the knowledge and improvise, improvise, improvise  Practicing scales "up and down" is useful in the beginning, to find your way in the fretboard but after a while I think it's pointless. Nowadays, when I learn a new scale I study the progression and improvise.

Let's put a link so you can hear it. This is about the best I can get it, start at 2:47 : https://soundcloud.com/pascal-dool/03-how-many-eau-clog/s-4kJca

Throw the metronome out of the window. 

Edited by Davesax1965 - April 01 2016 at 02:33