Introduction and Help Request

Hi everyone. My name is Shane and I just found this site a few days ago. I am getting ready to signup for full access. I just wanted to introduce myself and ask a few general questions about learning to become a better guitar player.

I have had my guitar for many years it is a '91 Fender Strat Plus Deluxe. I took lessons for about 6 months back when I first got the guitar, but I have hardly touched the guitar in the past 6 years. I picked it up a few weeks ago, and I decided it is time to put some effort into becoming a better player. Now with that said, I have no idea where to start to actually accomplish this.

I am familiar with Major, Minor, and Pentatonic scales and how patterns move around the fret board to produce different keys/chords/etc. When I say familiar, I mean that I know the patterns on the fret board.

My big problem is that my ear is not very good. I can not for the life of me pick out a song by ear. I even have trouble tuning my guitar by ear. I can tell when it is not in tune, but just can't seem to get it back in tune by ear. I have learned most everything that I can play by reading tablature or having someone show me. I would like to develop a better ear. Of course I can not sing anywhere in tune also.

My favorite type of music to listen to is 80's rock (Skid Row, Poison, Whitesnake, Tesla, etc.), guitar instrumentals (Vai, Eric Johnson, Satriani, etc.), Pink Floyd (David Gilmour), and modern Blues (SRV, Ian Moore, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, etc.).

Any information on a good practice routine, exercises, etc. would be great.

Thanks,

Shane

Hey Shane! Welcome to the GT family! :)

So yeah.. where to begin.. it's very hard for me to really say what you should start off with. If you like Pink Floyd, like I do, then there are some great songs you can learn that aren't all that hard. Take "Comfortably Numb" for example.. the main verse chord progress goes like this (from memory):

B / A / G / F# / E / B

That bit is played twice, quite slowly.. just follow the chord changes with the song.

The next bit, which is the 2nd part of the verse, goes something like this:

D / A / D / A...A-B-C / G / C / G

Play that bit twice.. the A-B-C part is just a transition from A, through B, to C.

I guess the next bit could be called the chorus:

A-B-C / G / D / D->into guitar solo...


Anyway.. the way I learnt all of that is by ear. The way I do it is to slide my finger up a single string, either the bottom-E or the A string. When the note I am playing, sounds like the note that is playing on the song, I stop and make a note of where I am. In the case of the first chord of the song.. I would have slid my hand up the bottom-E string and stopped on the 7th fret which is a B. Then I start the song again on my mp3 player, and because I know the next chord is LOWER than the B just by listening to the song.. I know that I need to slide my finger back down the bottom-E string till I find the next chord.. which turns out to be A (after finding the B, I probably would have started to play a standard E-shaped barre chord at the 7th fret rather than just playing one note).. Sliding the E-shaped barre chord or a single note along the E string will produce the same root note..

So anyway, I just keep sliding around till I get all the "root notes". At this point I still haven't established what kind of chords they are.. whether they are minor or major or whatever is irrelevant at this point.. I am just trying to find the root notes for the chords.

Find the root notes and you're more than halfway there..

P.S. Oh yes.. and buy yourself a guitar tuner!! :) lol.. Even if you tune every other string by ear, you still need to get one of them in tune to start with. And if you are having trouble tuning by ear.. why should you have to when there are 100's of different tuners out there. If you're just going to play around and the EXACT tuning doesn't really matter then you can get away with tuning by ear.. but when you want to play along with songs etc then you really need to be a lot more precise in your tuning... especially when you start playing with other people. Tuners are very cheap.. with some tuners costing as little as a set of guitar strings!

Also, while you're getting that.. get a new set of strings, some plectrums/picks, a string winder, possibly a fret brush if the fret-board has a lot of "gunk" between the frets.. all of these little things (besides the strings) are not essential.. but they certainly help and they are very cheap... Depending on which tuner you get, that will probably be the most expensive of the lot. A new set of strings can, usually, breathe life into an old guitar that hasn't had a re-string for.. 6 years.. lol

light487, thanks for the advice. I think that is the first time I actually got a good answer on how to learn a song by ear. Most people I ask just reply with it just comes natural. I like the aproach you described and will give it a shot.

Oh yeah, I do own a tuner. My remark was more aimed at describing how bad my musical ear really is. I assume my ear will get better with more practice.

Shane