Last June Judy's family came up for a barbecue and a few beers. Adam brought his guitar and we had a great sing song session in the living room. He's self thought and that night was the first time he played to an audience. I was really impressed and so wished I was able to just pick one up and play. I couldn't stop thinking about it and decided feck it, I'm gonna learn guitar.
I went online looking for a cheap beginners guitar, but was clueless as of what to buy, what type of strings, what to avoid etc... so I stuck a post up on irishpokerboards.com's bbv thread (general chat/advice thread) asking for advice. Within an hour or so hectorjelly (Darragh) posted offering to give me his guitar for free as he was travelling abroad and had no use for it anymore. I was gobsmacked by his generosity (another guy offered me all his guitar books and another offered me free lessons, IPB is a fantastic site), and I went down to his house and picked it up.
It's a beautiful guitar with a sweet sound. Although I didn't know it at the time, the action is quite high on it which is supposedly bad for beginners as it's more painful on the fingers, but I think high action is actually a good thing for a beginner as it causes calluses to develop far quicker. The pain was quite strong at first but it was short lived (three or four weeks) as opposed to long drawn out milder pain waiting on calluses to develop with a lower action.
I didn't really start with it until the beginning of September when I got back off holidays. I bought a dummies guide book and trawled Youtube vids but I was pretty much all over the place. I started to learn the basic chords, A D and E and found it really awkward switching from one to another. The tips of my fingers were stinging and had I not known that this was the norm I would've put the thing away for good. Every beginners article or vid online was telling me to not worry about it. I was trying to find tips on how to speed it up as I had read it could take up to six months for the calluses to develop. I was pressing the edge of a credit card into my finger tips while watching TV to try simulate guitar strings. I even bought a bottle of surgical spirits as I'd read it helps dry out the skin speeding up the process. I never really used it though and to my surprise my fingers toughened up within a really short time, and I've not had that pain at all since. I'd definitely recommend high action steel strings to an adult beginner.
Adam told me to check out www.justinguitar.com, a totally free teaching site. It's an amazing site and it put me on the right track with good structured learning. I feel I'm progressing really well and I decided to start this blog to help me track my progress. It's therefore meant really as a learning tool for me, so it might be quite boring for anyone that stumbles upon it, so forgive me if so.
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