Originally Posted by: haghj500Wow musically you've grown a lot in this thread! My guitar teacher was my brother in-law. He had already been out on the band circuit and left from burn out. I had to be able to make open chords as he said them before he started giving me songs. He said your not ready to learn songs if you still have to stare at your hands to make chords and can't make them fast enough to stay in time with the music. It couldn't argue with that, so I leaned them.

If you stay with what you said and learn them before moving on it will help you more than you understand at this time. You will have a real chance to work on your rhythm because you can form the chords fast enough that you don't have to stop your right hand and wait for your left hand to do it's thing.[/QUOTE]
That's what I hope. I think I made a big mistake by just jumping ahead when I started to get bored with not progressing. As a result, I can't play anything requiring both Barre and Open Chords, since switching between the two is an enormous challenge for me. I'll have to go back to Christopher's tutorials on how to practice Barre Chords and scales and "simple" stuff like that before I proceed. I need to get rid of my bad habits, preferably ASAP. That is, the sooner I get rid of my bad habits, the sooner I can start to do things right and not have my left hand cramp up after a minute of playing Barre and Power Chords :)

[QUOTE=maggior]I'll second the importance of learning good rhythm guitar and chording technique. I spent a couple of years playing acoustic guitar in a church group just strumming chords. My playing in general was greatly improved by the experience...even my lead playing. It *really* surprised me! Not saying you need to join an acoustic group, just don't dismiss the importance of playing chords and rhythm guitar in general.

If you walk into a group of people to play with and say "I only play lead" it's a major turn-off for the other players. A guy with the bunch I'm playing with currently is like this. You don't want to be "that guy" :-).

Glad to hear you got over your funk. There will be ups and downs, and you are learning how to deal with them.

Yeah, I tried playing in a small acoustic group last winter, when someone was hosting a guitar-workshop. I think there were somewhere between 15 and 20 of us, all strumming the chords to a few songs. It sounded pretty terrible, since less than half of the guitars were playing in time... But it was fun to try, which is just as important. I'm not going to do it again for a while, though.

I think you may have pointed out the main reason why I seem to have all kinds of trouble with finding good people to play with... Everytime I post an ad, I have a tendency of writing "Lead Guitarist looking for band members for band-start" or something like that in the headline, and never get around to mentioning that I do, actually, also play Rhythm. I should take that into consideration, once I get better... After all, Rhythm can be fun to play too, getting to play all the cool solos is just so much more awesome, and thus, more attractive :)

I too am glad I'm past my little down-time. Annoying as it was, it's helped me realize a lot of things. In the lights of this weekend's events (or lack of such), I've decided to try and come up with some kind of Practice Routine to help me get to where I want to be. It'll probably end up being me just spending every minute of my spare-time practicing, but if that's what it takes to reach my goals, I don't mind :)