guitar music is a place where the elements of rhythm, tone, emotions, harmony, melody, poetry, preparation, solitude, friendship, intellect, physical training and spirituality all meet. It involves your spirit, your body, your heart and your mind, and it is both a solitary and a social act. It not only offers the player the pleasure of making music, but it also offers to the skilled the ability to actually change other people's thoughts and feelings. Just by doing something you love to do, you can impart profound things to others and give them something they value. Those who discover that they have this ability, who feel obliged to develop it and who use it generously, will experience a reward comprising not only the satisfaction of the act itself, but also an abstract pleasure in sharing and communicating with others through the language of music. There is an energy, a sense of purpose and a direction that it imparts to its practitioners that can give a gratifying sense of meaning in what threatens to seem like a meaningless world.

Only through a lifetime of music will you experience an understanding of all the aspects of the art, but a basic awareness and regular reminders of the existence of all these various ingredients that make up music will allow the student to progress more quickly toward a mastery of it. There is, as always, a price to pay, and there are responsibilities that come with having the power to change other's thoughts and feelings, and not all who set out on this learning path make it all the way through. The essential element in the study of music is a love of music and an appreciation of its sacredness. At its finest it is a transcendental state that involves all parts of you, and allows you to exist on the crest of a wave, in the exact moment of the present as you perform each part of the music. It is only there, in the present that we can truly live and have control over our lives, since the past and future are inaccessible to us.

When you are deeply involved in music and when you have control of it, you can experience an excitement and a sense of well being that is impossible to duplicate. The sensation of the pleasure of music making is the primary thing a student of music must focus on. If enough time is spent in joyous music making and if the desire to share and transmit this feeling is strong and sincere, the hands will train themselves and the voice will find its true expression. One cannot hurry the process shyp you must instead enjoy and cherish it as it slowly unfolds.

There is an unfettered freedom in being a beginner that you may look back on fondly some day. The desire to be something other than what you are will impede your ability to grow, and the amount of pleasure that music brings is relatively constant. If you are not experiencing that pleasure and fulfillment as a student, then you must learn how to do that before you can go further. Harvey reid elkins west virginia 1992 1992 by harvey reid

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po box 815 york maine 03909 usa phone 207 363 1886 harvey reid has played and taught guitar for 40 years, was a former national fingerpicking guitar champion, and has released 32 highly acclaimed solo recordings of original, traditional, and contemporary acoustic music. He now lives in southern maine and is working on a very ambitious series of guitar books that are available from amazon.com and other online retailers and from this web site. If you decide you want to play guitar, there are a surprising number of strange obstacles in your way.

I hear from a lot of people who say i am going to get guitar lessons for my kid without realizing what a thorny and complex thing it is. Untold numbers of people are blaming themselves for not getting going or losing interest in their guitar lessons, when what they were being taught was not at all appropriate for what they wanted or needed. It's hard to believe that there are absolutely no rules, regulations or anything. Anybody can call themselves a guitar teacher, and they can teach anything they want.

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And yet guitar is the most common instrument, and chances are there is someone within a mile of you who could teach everything you need to learn, if you could only locate them. I am writing this in hopes that someone will read it and be able to better circumvent these obstacles, and perhaps better find their own place in the world of music more quickly and pleasantly. I have never seen anything in print that tried to describe how confusing the i want to learn guitar problem really is. Anybody can learn to bang out a few chords and have a good time playing some recreational guitar playing some sort of music that inetrests them. As a lifelong musician, i am quite surprised and downright annoyed by how much of the web sites and books and videos out there about how to learn to play guitar are just plain bogus, and fueled by some combination of ignorance, greed, or fantasy. There are almost no voices i hear telling it like it really is, which is about how real people have always managed and still do learn to play guitar and enrich their lives without formal training of any kind. So please take a few minutes and read this, then go and try to find a book or a teacher or whatever you decide you ought to do.

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Think of learning guitar as the old fashioned apprentice system, and don't get into the school or lessons mindset. make sure you get a guitar that suits what you want to do f inding an appropriate instrument may or may not be a simple matter. There are acoustic guitars with steel and nylon strings, flat and arched tops, and different width necks and scale lengths. There are electric guitars, and hybrid acoustic/electrics, resonator guitars and 12 strings, and they almost all come in a variety of body shapes, sizes, woods, and scale lengths. They are made by all sorts of companies and independent builders, and cost from $50 to $25,0.

Used guitars are often a good deal see my essay on buying a guitar , and even new guitars often need work to make them properly playable. Making sure you have a playable instrument, that is appropriate for the kind of music you want to play on it is the first step, and that alone is not simple. There are some very nice guitars to be had for a few hundred dollars, however, and it is a better time to buy an good quality, inexpensive instrument than it ever has been.

Sometimes people will lend you or give you an instrument because it is not a very good one, which is why it is available, and it may hold you back as much as help you. Find someone who knows such things, and make sure your instrument is right for you before you plunge into it. A local mom amp pop music store where the employees are all musicians is often a great place to get good advice and find a proper instrument. to sing or not to sing probably the most important issue is whether or not you want to sing. If you want to use the guitar to help you sing songs you already know and like, you are well positioned to have some success.

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If you do not envision yourself singing at all, or have no idea of what songs you would like to sing, you may have serious problems getting launched. Instrumental guitar is hard, and time consuming, and most people find that the time required to gain enough proficiency to allow you to enjoy yourself is simply not worth the effort. The people who are destined to be great players are already banging on the guitar, and not scratching their heads reading essays and wondering how to begin. If you are not sure you want to be a serious instrumental guitarist, you probably don't. Sing some bob dylan or john prine songs instead and have some beer or soda and pizza and enjoy life instead of closing the door on everyone and and practicing 3 hours a day, which rarely leads to other pleasures. I don't want to insult any of you who are fidgety loners, who really enjoy learning to play serious guitar, since that's what i did. It's just that after a lot of years of seeing people try to play guitar, i know the odds.

It's really fun to play un serious guitar, and i strongly urge anyone who thinks they want to play guitar to not sweat the issues of doing it right and instead focus on enriching your life with the ancient pleasure of playing songs you like. It can be incredibly fun to bang away clumsily and not too proficiently on a song you enjoy, and in my world view that sort of thing is much more needed and welcome than someone playing perfect scales and arpeggios in a practice room somewhere in preparation for perhaps someday playing some real music. lessons and schools if you decide you want guitar lessons, you face a lawless jungle. There is no established right way to learn guitar, though the two basic approaches are the acamedic and the non academic.

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Various people have developed methods for guitar, which try to boil it all down to a step by step system, that can be effective for certain types of music and certain types of students. It is very hard to do an organized, professional version of a non academic approach, and that usually means working with a private teacher. Schools have never really been involved in guitar education, though many colleges and even some high schools do have limited guitar programs. These are usually classical or jazz guitar, based on sight reading, and oriented toward ensembles that involve the most possible students. If the art of solo guitar interests you most, this might not be a good direction. It is of course a legitimate thing to do, and a valid approach to the instrument, but it is only one of many, and not always the best road for the recreational player. For example, if you are interested in playing guitar in altered tunings, which a huge number of today's players do, you can't use a sight reading approach to this, because sight reading is all based on standard tuning.

Very little of the music today's guitar players play is written down anyway, so sight reading is of limited value. There is no right answer as to whether or not a guitar student should learn about different tunings, and if so, when to do this in also unclear. You could do it from day 1, or you could never do it in 50 years, and neither would be more correct.