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Comment by jakeinspace | Hacker News Reader

Getting back into regular guitar practice (mostly classical). Also trying to broaden my musical horizons a bit: playing around with some virtual synths and my analog synth. I'm currently shopping for a hollow body or solid body electric guitar and amp, since I want to start getting into blues guitar. Hoping that I can meld some of the music production/synth stuff with guitar practice by laying down some backing synth+beat tracks and recording some guitar licks on top, hoping my little preamp buffer sounds okay.

I'm also starting a Coursera course in audio signal processing. Lets me scratch the technical itch a bit while not distracting from music. My goal for later this year is to build a guitar pedal or 2 from scratch.

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Just ordered my first guitar and audio interface yesterday. Any tips for really starting from 0? I will be looking for some online courses, but there’s so much information online that it is hard for me to find out which is good for absolute beginners and which is not.

As a beginner, I really like Justin Guitar (https://www.justinguitar.com/site-map-and-lesson-structure). But I'd love to know what other great resources are out there!

Not sure what exists out there, I started over 25 years ago. A good first step is to learn chords, starting with major and minor versions of each chord. Get comfortable switching between them. This is where most people quit as a lot of chords are not friendly to untrained fingers.

What can help with this is a concept called the "1, 4, 5" rule (it's actually called the I, IV, V rule but let's keep it simple). Basically, you start in a key, say the key of A, assign that to 1. The 4th and 5th chords from that starting chord always sound good with the 1st. So for the key of A, the 4th and 5th are D and E. Notes start over after G, so if 4 and 5 go past, like with G, you start over at A. In the key of G, the 4th and 5th are C and D respectively, for example. This is at the heart of blues music. For me, the easiest three-chord progression for my fingers to learn was G, C, and D.

There are a lot of little "rules" like that in music theory and it can be fun to learn them and experiment. If you find that you are really getting into it, I recommend dropping $300 or so on a decent acoustic guitar. There is something to be said about an instrument you can just pick up and play and not have to worry about wires and interfaces.

thank you very much (to you and to all others who replied). i went with an electric guitar as it will allow me to play during the night, without bothering neighbours. when i will get better i would love an acoustic, especially for flamenco.

Jamplay has a lot of traditional video tutorials for all levels.

Yousician has some fun guitar hero-esque tutorials if you’d like more interactive feedback.

There’s a book called The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar [0] that I found to be helpful. It’s not at all about playing specific songs or chords but entirely devoted to the mechanics of how to practice, how to hold the guitar, how to notice and relax tension, how to build speed, stuff like that. It’s a bit meta but I think it’d set you up with a good foundation.

[0] https://www.guitarprinciples.com/shop/the-principles-of-corr...

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