learning guitar......?

Question

can anyone suggest any books for learning how to play electric guitar? preferably with chord charts and other helpful and discriptive tools. and less than $40 if possible! i cant afford lessons!! lol

Answer 1

well, a lot of how to teach yourself electric guitar depends on what you wanna do with it - the simple, just-for-fun stuff, like just playing at home, playing along with your favourite song, starting a small band with your friends - or the more serious, improvised solos, become the great guitarist the world has ever known, join the school jazz band kinda route. If you're serious, you'll wanna be careful starting out - starting out on the wrong foot can teach you the wrong way, and having to relearn the right way is harder than learning for the first time.

So if you're not serious, just get some tabs off the internet (ultimate-guitar.com is great for that), and just learn some chords and jam to your favourite songs. There's nothing wrong with that, guitar is really fun. However, if you're serious enough to be looking into lessons and books, you're probably wanting to do something with it.

Tabs and standard notation are the two methods of reading/writing guitar music. In case you're not familiar with either, here's the rundown. Tabs are diagrams which show 6 lines, with a series of numbers on them. each line represents a guitar string, and each number represents the fret you have to press down to play. here's an example:

-----------------------------8----------------------
-----------------------------8----8----------------
---------------5---------5-----------0------------
---4444------------7----------------------------
---4444------------------------------------------
---2222------------------------------------------
Reading tabs, you just play the frets/strings in the order shown, but they give you no idea of rythem. you know that the '0' on the 4th string has to be played sometime after the '8' on the fifth string, but you have no idea when, unless you've listened to the song and you can figure it out.

Tabs aren't very reliable, because you have to have already have heard the song in order to get the rythems, and they're only made really by people on the internet who just want to share music. Tabs are easy to read, but if you're in a jazz band and the conductor hands you sheet music, it's going to be standard notation, not tabs. Tabs are easier to read, for beginners, but if you learn to read standard notation first (which takes a little more time, and some music theory, but not a lot), you'll have the upper hand. Standard notation is used in guitar books, all music theory, and all other sheet music. It's much more universal.

I would advise learning musical notation first, but also learn tabs. The problem with learning tabs first is that once you start, you're hooked. You'll keep reading the tab instead of the standard notation, and you'll never get around to learning the right way.

Anyway, guitar books. I just went out the other day and bought a set of books for one of my students - I bought a beginner's guide to playing guitar (known as a "method book"), a chord book, and a scale book. Method books come in different catagories, like "teach yourself ACOUSTIC guitar" or "teach yourself JAZZ guitar", etc. Unless you're dead set on jazz or rock or whatever you want to play, i would reccomend something very general, so you can apply it to whatever you want to play now, and in the future. For my student, i bought "beginning acoustic guitar", published by Alfred music publishers. This is the first of a three book series, beginning-intermediate-mastering, and i strongly reccomend it. the first book has a good bit of musical theory, in case you're new to music, with tabs and standard notation, some technical stuff on the acoustic guitar, and a bit of jazz stuff. Remeber that the acoustic guitar is played the same way an electric is, and this book is really very general, dispite its name. Greg Horne wrote this book, and the whole book is really excellent.
The scale book is called "step one: play guitar scales", published by amsco. I think this is a great book, because it not only gives you all the scales you'll need, but some tips on you to practice them and use them efficiently, so you really understand where you're going with it.
For chords, I bought Mel Bay's Guitar chords. it's really simple and nice to use - it has pretty much every chord you'll ever need, and a little photograph beside it, because some chords are sooo awkward to finger, and that really helps on the tricky ones.
These books are priced at $28.95, $7.95, and $10.95, respectively. The method books are always the most expensive, because they come with a cd, and are very thick, with lots of info. If you're just starting out, you might not need a scale book just yet, and the method book would probably have a number of chords in it, so the chord book isn't totally necessary, though reccomended. I'd start off with the method book, then the chord book, then the scale book.
I'd also reccomend trying to find a guitar repitoire book (repitoire is just a fancy word for songs) with music that you're interested in, cuz sitting down all day to do scales is really boring, and doing too much work at the beginning is discouraging. Find a songbook and have some fun with it.

Good luck with your guitar-ing, if that's a word : )

-adam jay

Answer 2

go to a music or book store thats what they are for. but dude just learn by ear, its so much fun.

Answer 3

go to you local music store and ask for help. they should tell you some good stuff to start out with