Learning To Play The Guitar Online

[Elton]

For years, I've wanted to learn to play the electric guitar and have decided that now's the time to do something about it. I can't afford proper lessons, so am looking to pick up as much information as possible online.

 

Has anybody ever done this? If so, could you recommend any good websites?

 

Also, what would be a good guitar to start with? I want to play rock music, mainly, and need something fairly cheap.

 

tia,

 

Elton

[Steve Walker]

Youtube is a good resource for guitar lessons - in fact, my guitar tutor often used to use youtube lessons as a teaching aid. Had to give the lessons up eventually - 20 quid a shot once a week gets very expensive, very quickly, but I must say that I did enjoy them and I did get a lot out of them. I had already been playing for a long time when I started them, though, and just wanted to improve. If you can find someone else who can play a bit, and practice together, you will both improve faster than playing alone, and it's good fun. The thing I enjoyed best with my tutor was a bit of work we did on the 12 bar blues and improvisation - you learn a simple sequence of chords and a scale (a set of notes) you can play over them. One of you plays the chord sequence, the other improvises using the notes from the scale, and you soon find that even such a simple thing sounds really good.

 

This kind of thing:

 

Youtube Video ->Original Video

 

Guitar-wise, I play acoustic mostly and my electric is very old and very cheap and not very good - I'd quite like a new one! The cheapest way is probably eBay and some advice from people with more experience of buying leccy guitars than I have. If it were me, I would probably find a music shop that sells secondhand as well as new guitars and tell them my budget and what I want to play. I wouldn't buy a brand new cheap guitar.

[DavyR]

I taught meself when I was 16, but these online lessons look ok to me:

 

http://www.electric-guitar.co.uk/Lessons/

 

I can recommend the guitar I play (although I play more acoustic than electric these days), the Yamaha Pacifica. It's not a fashionable label, but has been consistently recommended as the best buy for around £200 for donkey's years now.

 

There are always plenty on eBay, although (as with any musical instrument) it's best to actually handle a few to see if they suit you first. The earlier (1980s) Pacificas are mean to be better than the later ones, but then that's true of most makes!

 

Don't be seduced by the cheaper Fender ranges on account of the famous name - a Pacifica will blow a Fender Squier out of the water on both sound quality and playability.

[DavyR]

A review of the Pacifica here:

 

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews53763.html

[Steve Walker]

A review of the Pacifica here:

 

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews53763.html

 

Must... resist... don't... need... more... guitars...

[Colin Brett]

I'd suggest one of these as a reasonable starter instrument

 

No idea about lessons apart from trying here

 

Colin

[DavyR]

I'd suggest one of these as a reasonable starter instrument

 

No idea about lessons apart from trying here

 

Colin

 

Superb value - I'll take half-a-dozen! Don't knock Bert, Colin, a lot of us started with that book (and the "more advanced" "Play Every Day") in the 60s!

[Colin Brett]

Superb value - I'll take half-a-dozen! Don't knock Bert, Colin, a lot of us started with that book (and the "more advanced" "Play Every Day") in the 60s!

I wouldn't dream of knocking Bert in fact I thought I was bigging him up as his is the only guitar tutorial I know of!

 

I hope we all get tickets to your first gig Elton??

[yorkio]

I'd second what Davy said about the Pacificas – they really are very good for the money and if you can pick up a decent second-hand one, that's a very good guitar indeed for next to nothing. Guitars have taken a similar sort of path to fishing tackle over the past 20 years or so though, in that it's actually quite hard to buy the sort of useless old tat that anyone who learnt to play in the Seventies would have been all too familiar with. You may well find there are guitars you don't get on with, but there's not that much absolute junk around any more. Whatever you get though, put aside a few quid to get it set up properly, or, if you're buying it from a shop, make sure they give it a set-up before you take it away.

 

I really would recommend you get a couple of lessons to start with though. At the very least, you'll need someone to tell you how to tune up and how to hold the damn thing! It's a bit like learning fly-casting – if you're keen enough and with the aid of a few books or DVDs, you can figure it out on your own, but a teacher will just fast-track you through the frustrating initial learning period when you might be most likely to give up. In fact, it might even be worth getting a tutor sorted before you buy a guitar, as he could steer you in the direction of a sensible purchase and away from something you might regret later on.

[Alan Stubbs]

For the same money, I'd recommend Farida guitars. They've got a decent tone, sound is not bad and the bridge on the one I played was quite low, and with a fairly narrow fretboard makes a full barre quite possible to people like me with small hands. The advantage is that it makes playing lead really much easier. The one I tried had quite light gauge strings but still gave a quite powerful account of itself.

 

The Epiphone Les Paul Copy is also not bad, but weighs a tonne and is quite hard work to play - but you can get a really gutsy blues tone out of it.