Lessons, or self taught?

[not darth]

Did you start out taking lessons or did you just pick up the guitar and start learning on your own?
Except for three lessons almost twenty years ago, I have been trying to learn on my own. 

If self taught, did you set up any sort of curriculum for yourself or have you just worked on random things each time you practice?
I'm sure my progress would be faster with lessons but it just won't work with my schedule right now, so I'd like to find a way to maximize my practice sessions.
Thanks, -K

[pacmktg]

I use Learn and Master Guitar by Steve Krenz and a scattering of a few lessons.

[michaelw]

i tried a few basic beginner books when i started & then pretty much
just went to the internet for tabs of songs i wanted  to learn how to play -
i had some piano background way-back & some it was i able to apply (1-4-5)

i asked a friend to help me find a chord progression for a song i was learning &
which turned into 'a lesson' & it was very difficult to follow what he was doing,
as he knew what it was & he wanted me to mirror what he was doing exactly

i've found that playing to a track, especially if you have a 2 channel amp & can run the CD/mp3
(audio) & the guitar in & setting the guitar level slightly higher, getting a 'feel' for it is easier

also, just being able to jam with others can be a great way to learn & move forward -
during the time that i played rhythm acoustic at the church i attended, i found that my
playing progressed much faster than all the time that i'd tried learning on my own, as i
had to learn it & had to keep going, which was much easier being able to 'feel' the music

haven't played in good while, especially recently, due to an injury i had in early September -
hopefully, it will continue to heal & i'll be able to 'adapt' so that i can enjoy those tones again

[barefooter]

I've never had any lessons and it shows    I started out by watching TV shows like Hee Haw, The Arthur Smith Show, American Bandstand, etc. (showing my age).  I initially had a sheet of paper that had a few chords on it.  I took those chords and what I saw on TV and began trying to make music.  There was a band that practiced two houses down and I would go down there and watch and learn.  From there, I would listen to 45 or 33 1/3 RPM records and learn a song.  Basically all of my playing comes from 'playing by ear'.  I cannot read music at all.

[InsideOut]

Self-taught out of some horrible book for a few months.  Some friends of mine introduced me to tab.  They gave me photocopies of songs from their magazines.  There wasn't anyone to take lessons from where I lived.  A year or so later, I took six or seven lessons.  From then on, I was pretty much on my own.  I agree, playing with other people is more of an education than anything.

[not darth]

Thanks for the replies!  Glad to know I'm not the only one that's working/worked on it on my own.  Sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting time by not taking formal lessons, but since I'm feeling/hearing improvement I must be doing something right. 

I have a few guitar method books, and books of Beatles tabs, but they aren't what have been most helpful.
The two resources I credit with most of my progress are YouTube videos of regular folks playing covers of songs I like, especially those in which they break it down as an instructional. 
The other one are the tabs from Ultimate Guitar website, and now their app on Android.  I'm starting to be able to read tab fairly well, but my timing is still a struggle.
Foot tapping is really hard for me, I do better counting 1-and 2-and 3-and 1-and 2-and..... in my head as I work through tab very slowly. 
I have a metronome from my clarinet days, but haven't tried using it with guitar.

This sure is a fun process!

-K

[mtnman]

I started over 20 years ago with three or four lessons from a great guitar teacher that a friend referred me to. His method was to take a song you like, then break it down by structure: ie: Verse 1, Bridge, Chorus, etc. Each week we spent the hour reviewing one section. Then I would go away and practice just that part - most of the time using the method of having the track play and I play along but louder. That was a great introduction for me. Just strumming chords and picking basic parts (Boston's More Than a Feeling).

Then I spent a year or two by myself applying the teacher's method: listen to the song and figure out the chords, break down the structure, etc. The real eye opener happened in my third year: a community college private instruction course.

I told the instructor I wanted to learn the fretboard past the "cowboy chords" in the first position and basic barr chords. So we settled on 12 bar blues and pentatonic scales. That was a great experience - laid back, fun, instructional. All sessions were recorded on tape so I could go home and practice.

After that it was the tab books, play along, etc. However, my son's experience was very different.

A buddy of mine played the LA scene in the hairband days. They never broke out, but he can really shred on electric. He was hanging out at our house one night right after I had picked up a new electric. Up to this point my kid didn't care a lick about guitars. But upon hearing my buddy run through a couple of songs he immediately ran into the room...can you teach me that?

They setup one lesson, but my kid didn't really have the patience. He already was playing sax at school and piano at home. But, learning the guitar at first can be very frustrating.

What really accelerated his growth were those instructional videos on youtube. He would just watch those a couple times, try to play, watch again. He learns songs in 30 minutes now. He is a speed demon on electric (Breaking Benjamin, Three Days Grace, Ozzy, etc). I wish I had the net back when I was 14.

The other day he wanted to learn Zac Brown's song Free. So, he pulled up a youtube instructional video on his iPhone, watched it a couple times while it was on his knee, noodled his way through it on acoustic, and now it's in his repetoire.

I really suggest leveraging the net. We also have apps on the iPad and iPhones. There is so much content online it boggles the mind.

Hope that helps a bit.

[DMBfan41]

I've been self-taught for over 10 years.  Started with a cheap guitar and a Mel Bays chord book.  The internet got popular (and cheap) and my learning progressed significantly.  I never took lessons online or anything but spent countless hours printing all my favorite songs that could be played with just simple chords.  A year or so into my venture, an old meat butcher I knew and played with often taught me the concept behind the barre chord.  My playing possibilities exploded once I could actually get my fingers to work.

6 weeks ago I started taking lessons for the first time.  I told my teacher I really wanted to be able to play around the fret board with different chord shapes, improvisation, add fills in between chords, etc.  It has been a blast!  It took me a week to get all 5 positions of the minor pentatonic down pat.  Now I can sit down with someone else play, figure out the key and progression, and just play away.

Last couple weeks we've been working more with music theory and chord composition, why things sound good together, etc.  I really wish I had done this earlier in my playing but whatever.  Better late than never.  I also would have been perfectly fine not taking lessons at all.  More of a personal decision in wanting to expand my playing a bit.

[flaggerphil]

I took lessons for a year when I got my first guitar back in 1964.  Never took lessons again, but I've been thinking seriously about it since I'll have more time on my hands after the 1st of the year.  There are just some things I want to learn that I think I'll do better on if I take lessons from a teacher I like.

Now I just have to find one...

[Jack Sparrow]

Thanks for the replies!  Glad to know I'm not the only one that's working/worked on it on my own.  Sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting time by not taking formal lessons, but since I'm feeling/hearing improvement I must be doing something right. 

I have a few guitar method books, and books of Beatles tabs, but they aren't what have been most helpful.
The two resources I credit with most of my progress are YouTube videos of regular folks playing covers of songs I like, especially those in which they break it down as an instructional. 
The other one are the tabs from Ultimate Guitar website, and now their app on Android.  I'm starting to be able to read tab fairly well, but my timing is still a struggle.
Foot tapping is really hard for me, I do better counting 1-and 2-and 3-and 1-and 2-and..... in my head as I work through tab very slowly. 
I have a metronome from my clarinet days, but haven't tried using it with guitar.

This sure is a fun process!

-K

I hate to say it since you said they helped you a lot, but watch out for online tabs, especially Ultimate Guitar. They're attractive because they're free, but you get what you pay for: a lot (most?) of them are inaccurate. You are much better off buying a commercial songbook that has tabs. If you can read music at all this will help with your timing too, since even if you can't read the notes, you can still use the musical notation above the tabs to help with timing. Or if you can't read music at all, at least the notes in the tabs are spaced out more accurately than the free ones online. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't trust the accuracy of most online things. I would rather learn from "the source": the original recordings and published books.

Only tap your foot if it helps you keep time. If you keep time better without tapping your foot, then stop tapping it! When I'm learning a song I don't count or tap my foot, I listen to the song and imitate the timing until I can play right along with the recording.

As for teacher or no teacher, that depends entirely on your learning style and how well you connect with the teacher. For some people it's a waste of time to not have a teacher, for some people it's a waste of time to have one.

Everyone is different, do whatever gets you to your goals the best.

[mtnman]

I hate to say it since you said they helped you a lot, but watch out for online tabs, especially Ultimate Guitar. They're attractive because they're free, but you get what you pay for: a lot (most?) of them are inaccurate.

This is an excellent point. In fact, I don't trust online tabs either. Good in a pinch to get you close, but these sites tend to have multiple versions submitted by users - none of them are ever 100% accurate.

You are much better off buying a commercial songbook that has tabs.

Agreed - combine a commercial songbook with the actual recording and you have a great starting point, perhaps all you'd ever need. But when you add in a great instructional video you can see how others exactly position/move their fingers. That is one of the benefits of a teacher especially when starting out. They can identify your positioning (both hands) and help coach technique.

If you have an iPad there is a great app called TabToolkit. It loads tab files (official/otherwise) and plays the resulting audio while displaying the fingerings as dots on the fretboard. Pretty cool, haven't used it much but like what I see.

[gdeleo]

Glad you started this topic.  I have been taken lessons for about a year now and each week when I go I learn something new.   I am not sure how long I will continue, but I never thought I would have gotten this far without them. 

Does anyone know how long should someone take lessons?  There is soooo much to learn about playing the guitar and I am not sure I will live long enough to learn everything.....

[not darth]

Good points about the free online tabs from Ultimate Guitar, etc.
I figure, you get what you pay for, and they're free, so......   
I don't assume they are very accurate, but they are one way to kind of start to figure out a song.
When browsing the selection, I look for the user star ratings and the number of ratings.  More likely to trust a tab with 200 4-stars than 7 5-star ratings. 

Every once in awhile someone has included fingering suggestions with the free tabs, but usually not. 
I look at free tabs as just one more tool to help me figure stuff out. 
-K

[revster]

I took lesson over ten years ago just to get started back, but moved soon after, and lost my teacher. last two years using Learn&master guitar with Steve Krenz. this has both help me really progress and keep excited.

[not darth]

Well it sounds like there's quite a mix here of people that took some lessons sporadically and worked on a lot of self-teaching as well.
I'm glad to hear about some of the resources you all mentioned, I'm definitely going to check them out! 

Also, I've got one friend that is both into guitars AND willing to help a newb out, so we're going to try to get together to jam a bit and he suggested maybe one of us maintaining a bass rhythm while the other works on a melody, and vice versa.  I think that would be fun, I'm a bit embarrassed to show someone else how poorly I play, but I figure, gotta start somewhere. 
Even Chet Atkins didn't know what 1-4-5 was at one time. 
-K