Originally Posted by: pattyb5Yes, I will never be a Steve Vai but I CAN play and have a lot of people fooled into believing that I'm a "hot" guitar player......

After all these years....If I knew what I knew now I'd learn the following things right off the bat...And ironically, you can learn these pretty quickly if you apply yourself and practice consistently. IMO

1. Learn the basic open position chords ("cowboy" chords).
2. Learn the basic E and A string barre chords-major, minor, etc) Learn the "hendrix chord too"....always comes in handy and is a must know)
3. Try to learn, at least, the note names on the E and A string. You have to know them to utilize the barre chords. And if you know the low E then you also know the notes on the high E. So, in affect, you know half the note names on the fret board just by doing this. Neil Walter, on this site, has a good tip video about finding notes names on the fingerboard.
4. Learn the 5 Major and Minor pentatonic scale shapes. The are both the same shapes. Only difference is the "root" notes.
5. From there...learn the "chord shapes" contained within these scales. It really isn't that hard and will help you "see" the root notes and give you a basic understanding of how leads are formed from chord shapes.
6. Learn songs from START to FINISH...don't fall prey, like I did, to learning a part of one song and then moving on to the next and then the next....what happens is: you learn a bunch of PARTS and then forget a lot of them and then you are right back to where you were. You know no songs and have nothing but riffs and licks that no one but your guitar friends are going to want to listen to.
7. Jam with other people as quick as you can. Go to blues jams. I'd try to jam with a drummer ahead of another guitar player. Don't know if that is the best way but that seemed to do a lot more for me than jamming with other guitar players.

that is the great thing about this site....All of this info (and more) is here and is explained in video format. And there are great songs that you can learn that go with the basics. As I've/and others have said before, if I would have had a resource like this when I was just starting out, it would have taken YEARS off my own personal learning curve. Back in the day, just having a decent tab book was awesome. Now, the guitar resources available are off the charts. Good luck and rock on!!