Do I need lessons?

If you know many guitar players, you probably know most of them are at least partially self-taught, and the majority cannot read music. Guitar, and other plucked instruments like mandolin, dulcimer, banjo, etc. seems mostly to be handed down from player to player, from generation to generation. But if you don't have guitars in your ancestry, don't worry, I was the first guitarist in my family too, although I certainly wasn't the last!

So barring having Grandpa Walton or Andy Griffith around to teach you, what should you do? Do you really need a teacher? The answer depends largely on what you want to do with the guitar, and how far you are willing to take it. If you're hoping to pursue a career as a guitarist, studio work is a definite possibility, and being able to read music a necessity. If your desire is to be up on stage as a touring musician, reading music is handy but probably not necessary. As a songwriter or singer/songwriter, or as a member of a band sight-reading is next to useless, particularly if you can master the much easier guitar tablature.

My advice for the absolute beginner is to take lessons, at least for 4-6 weeks. Learn the 5 or 6 basic chords that make up 80% of all recorded music, maybe a few of the "walking down" chord forms you often hear between certain chords, and learn a couple of songs you really want to learn to play (not "Old Macdonald"!). If you've learned the chords and a few songs and don't know where to go from there, lessons that teach you to replicate a few classics note for note may be just what you need to restart your creative engine.

For anyone sure the guitar is their instrument, lessons are superfluous except insofar as they teach sight reading, a skill you may never use. And since private lessons are expensive, perhaps you should opt for an online course, of which there are myriad examples. These provide the advantage of being able to see the fingerings and chord grips in extreme closeup in addition to being able to ask questions like you would during a lesson in person. Big advantages are no travel time and the cost is a fraction of private lessons. You can afford a top notch professional lesson via skype for about what you'd pay the senior in high school down the block who gives lessons part time.

Or you could do what generations of guitarists have done: watch what the guitar player is doing whenever you see live music, then grab a guitar and try to duplicate it! Here is where the Net and youtube are invaluable. Say you want to know how to play "That's the way (it ought to be)" by Led Zeppelin. No problem: there are two dozen lessons on youtube ranging from stumbling beginner to absolute master. And if none of those fit your bill, there are several videos of Jimmy Page himself playing in clear closeup. And any parts that are not clear on video can usually be cleared up by referring to tablature, of which there are several hundred thousand examples available free online.

Of course watching will not make you a guitarist. Only practice can do that, lots of practice, although that will be limited at first by pain. Yes, playing the guitar is painful, at least until you develop some serious callouses on your fingers, but that doesn't take long if you're practicing 2-3 hours a week. As you gradually build those callouses you can extend your practice sessions, but remember to keep it fun - making music, even if it's your job, should never be drudgery.

Buying a guitar

About the worst thing you can do to a beginner guitarist is give him a bad guitar, one that's hard to play, doesn't stay in tune, or has bad harmonics. So for that first guitar, stick with well known names, like Squier, Epiphone and Sigma, which are sub-brands of Fender, Gibson and Martin. Low end models cost around a hundred dollars, and while you get what you pay for, Fender Gibson and Martin aren't putting their names on crappy guitars. Once you learn the basics on this beginner guitar, you are ready to purchase your first "real" guitar, one you might keep for a long time, so you want to make an informed buy.

First, establish your budget ceiling; mine is around $650, and I have several great guitars, but that eliminates brands like Taylor and Martin. If your heart is set on one of these superb guitars, bring along at least a grand. Next, make your short list if you have one: guitars you have heard and liked, guitars you have played and liked, guitars recommended by others, some ideas to get started with. I recommend bringing along a guitar playing friend, but that is optional. At the store you want to do a blind play test first. Give your list to your salesperson and together pick out 6 or 7 models you'd like to try. You don't have to be actually blindfolded to do this, but it wouldn't hurt. The point is to play without any preconceptions about the instrument that might color your actual at-the-moment impressions. Have each guitar brought to you at random (here's where the friend is handy to keep the salesfolk honest) and do process of elimination (this one's better than that, but not as good as this) until you have 3 finalists. Toss out the most expensive one (unless the difference in cost is negligible) and have your friend or the salesperson play the guitar for you. Some guitars sound better to the audience than to the player, and that's really what you're interested in, isn't it? So now you have your winner and you buy it!

Whoah, not so fast! Don't you think you could save a few dollars buying on E-bay or craiglist? Quite probably you could, and now you know what your dream guitar sounds and feels like. Remember the one you put aside because it was too expensive? See if you can find oneof those for less than you were going to pay for the guitar you picked!

Also let your decision marinate in your mind - you might even want to try a new model via craigslist just for a final comparison. Used guitars sometimes come with other goodies, too, like hardshell cases, pickups and tuners, so ask after the particulars.

And finally...congratulations on your new guitar! The final thing I would do is take it to my local luthier and have them do a standard setup on it: check intonation, lower the action, etc. It usually costs $50 or less and is often well worth it, but if you think the guitar is perfect, forego the added cost. Now that you have your new axe, don't let your friends tell you that you should have bought their favorite model of guitar instead - you bought the best model for you at this time, and maybe for years to come. Now get to rocking!

So many guitars!

It seems like a logical question for an amateur to ask a guitarist: "Why do you need so many guitars?", but for the guitarist it may be a question he/she has never even thought about. Of course different guitars sound different, especially when you're talking about 6 string versus 12 string or acoustic versus electric, and there are many guitarists who have a favorite brand of guitar and will play nothing else, whether it's a Les Paul or a Martin D-28. For me and for a lot of experienced guitarists, the main reason is alternate tunings: you can keep one guitar in standard tuning, one guitar in Drop D, one guitar in double drop D, and one in open C. This way, you can switch from one song to the next by just substituting a properly tuned one, and not have to bother with retuning for every song.

While some of these tunings are simple (in Drop D for instance, you change only one string) but in some tunings, like the famous one for Led Zeppelin's Rain Song, four of the strings have to be retuned (there's a live tuning that requires only two strings changing, thankfully) and the open C tuning mentioned requires retuning three strings. Thats a lot of droning offkey strings being heard in between songs. Multiple guitars alleviate this problem.

Not to be discounted is the simple pleasure of owning a beautiful or particularly lovely sounding guitar (not always the same thing). I have a stunning Crafter acoustic electric that is just awesome cosmetically, and while a nice sounding guitar (and my only pluggable acoustic) it cannot hold a candle sonically to my super-ugly Alvarez 12 string, which can sound like angels singing when played.
And it isn't a matter of cost...I paid only $125 for the Crafter and $145 for the Alvarez, making them the cheapest guitars in my arsenal, yet possibly the guitars most often played!

Finally there is the possibility of collecting guitars for their resale value, which is a tricky proposition. If you have a Les Paul or an old Guild acoustic with a serial number in the teens, you could make a fortune (there was a very early Fender Strat that went for $350,000 on Antiques Roadshow), but most guitars don't greatly increase in value unless played by someone famous or used in a notable concert or recording session. Add to this the simple fact that guitarists do not like to sell their guitars no matter how many they may have. I have bought almost a dozen guitars over the years but sold only two of them - the rest were bartered away in the course of purchasing other guitars. I have in fact been offered three times what I paid for my Norman B30 (around a thousand dollars) but didn't even consider it, since I doubt I could find another that sounds as sweet for a grand.

Some will argue that these multiple guitars don't get used all that much, and that there is only one main axe that is irreplaceable, but I personally have played four of my guitars (and my mandolin) in the past week, and that is not at all unusual. For some, one guitar is enough and more than enough (I don't think Willie Nelson has put his down in 60 years!) while for others, there is no such thing as too many guitars. Count me among the latter! And by the way, would you be interested in selling that old guitar?

Alternate Tunings

I play the guitar. Not like your uncle who takes his out 2 or 3 times a year, I play one of mine every day, and have for many years. I can honestly say that music has helped me retain my sanity on more than one occasion, and songs I have played for 35 years are like old friends, comfortable and familiar. But like every guitarist, I've reached plateaus and obstacles until I was wondering if I should quit playing. And then I'd get fired up again whenever I learned some new song or technique.

One of my favorite re-starters in this case is alternate tunings. Some songs are borderline impossible to play in standard tuning, and anyway, artists like Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell have written entire libraries of songs in alternate tuning. They're tricky enough to play in these different tunings and frankly mind-boggling in standard tuning "translations".

For you non-guitarists or beginning axemen (or women - my wife plays too) alternate tunings mean any deviation from the standard EADGBE (from low to high) on a 6 string guitar. The most common is called Drop D and to get there, you tune that first and lowest E string down to a D an octave below the fourth string D. You get wonderful ringing D chords out of this and lots of great songs have been written in Drop D, including the Beatles "Blackbird" and "The Preacher, the teacher" by Yes. A further variation on this is a Double Drop D, where you also lower the high E string down to a D. And once you're there, if you just raise the B string up to an A, you'd have the most famous alternate tuning, DADGAD, probably just because it sounds cool to say it! There's some lovely songs in DADGAD by Led Zeppelin, Crosby Stills & Nash and others. Open C tuning is one of those that give you a nice ringing chord without any fretting. Jimmy Page liked this one too, as did Soundgarden, Bad Company and the Moody Blues.

I have some lessons using alternate tuning, all of which are on my previous post. I've also added a bunch of standard tuning lessons, including Annie's song, From the Beginning, Over the hills and far away, Friend of the Devil, Dun Ringill, Sandman, Old Tennessee, Desperado, The Wedding song, and others. These are not polished performance pieces; these are more like sitting down with a buddy who shows you how to play the song. Rough but hopefully effective.

So alternate tunings are great. It's a shame we can't have alternate tunings for reality, like accessing one of these parallel worlds the cosmologists talk about, one where everything is just a little different, every flavor, every note just slightly altered. Hopefully somewhere some mad scientist is working on this!

Music

I have read that music is closely tied to mathematics, but I'm no judge of that, as I have the musical gift but not the mathematical. When I took up music, it was 1966, so of course I chose the guitar. After almost 45 years it seems unlikely I will ever put it down. I am not a professional musician, although I have little doubt that I could be, were I so inclined. I've got mad chops, as they say, and I can duplicate almost any guitar part. What really turns me on about music however is the creative aspect, the ability to grab an instrument and make new music that has never been played before! It has always seemed like magic to me, this spontaneous production of new musical ideas, and while I don't think I've had any Bach or Mozart moments, it is pleasant to listen to and in fact you can listen to it here: http://www.reverbnation.com/#!/linfloyd or if you'd like a lesson on how to play Norwegian Wood, And You and I from Yes, Still You Turn me on, Rocky Mountain High, you'll find them here on YouTube.