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After playing the piano for 6 years now I have decided I want to start learning a second instrument and it will be the guitar.
I have reached ABRSM grade 8 standard on the piano so I have good knowledge of music theory.

What is the best way to start learning the guitar and what type of guitar should I play.The reason I ask is because I have experience on the piano and may find it more difficult learning guitar tabs than reading a treble cleff.

Has anyone here done piano first then decided to add the guitar if so what is your saying on this and what type of guitar did you start with eg;nylon classical,or steel string or a eltro accoustic etc.

Any advice would be great.

Daz

If your going the classical guitar route I would stick to the treble clef. Even other styles would be good, but maybe the sheet music won't be as precise.
I actually played classical guitar before piano.
And if your going classical get the nylon string guitar. Steel strings is not for the classical style and vise versa.

Peter

Here's a brief overview of your guitar choices.
http://www.harmonyofstrings.com/types.htm

You might also want to join a guitar forum. I suspect there will be a lot of people there who can help you get started.

Maybe one day, you'll be able to do this .

Piano transfers very well to learning guitar. After ten years of piano lessons, it took me about two years of guitar to get to a level to make a living playing it.

I started with acoustic lessons to learn technique, then found it easy to teach myself the rest. I would start with finger picking either a nylon or steel string acoustic. Find some lessons to learn the basics, it is very easy to branch out to other styles (electric rock for me.)

Now if only the mandolin would come as easily!

You should first decide what you want to play. Only then should you decide what kind of guitar you should get.

Why? Because skills learned on one type of guitar don't necessarily translate to another type. Some people say to learn on nylon string guitars, even if they want to learn metal. Problem is, once they get the electric guitar, they don't know how to mute the strings.

So decide what you want to play first:

* Classical? Obviously get a nylon-string classical guitar.

* Folk? Get a steel-string acoustic.

* Other? Well, this is where it gets tougher, because you can play rock/country, etc. on both electric and steel-string acoustic. So here you have to think about how you'll be playing. Will you be sitting around the campfire playing for friends? Get the steel-string acoustic. Will you be jamming with a band? Get an electric.

As for tab versus treble clef, you have a step up on other beginners, because you already know how to read music. But here, it's still a question of what you want to play. If you want to play rock, you'll have to learn TAB. Anything else, you just use the music reading skills you already have.

I actually learned guitar as a kid (with violin and cello in between) but did not play it actively in groups until college and graduate school.

I played mostly popular music. In 2007, I decided to try the piano and it was not until April this year when I had my Casio DP set up that I got serious about learning.

I would start off with nylon strings to get use to the fingerings, then graduate to a acoustic with a built-in pickup (I have a Takamini guitar which I bought over 13 years ago). I would select something that would project if you are a lone guitarist in a church choir (was in that position many years). Keep this in mind and you will do fine.

- Mark

Hi,

Like Mark I started with a nylon string classical style guitar. Easy on the soft newbie fingers, and a nice wide neck for those clumsy inexperienced digits to plonk themselves down on. Later I moved to steel string acoustic and then on to electrics.

Your general musical knowledge will be very handy. Even pop and rock music is fairly widely available in standard notation form. Most of the TAB found free on the internet is relatively useless unless you already know the tune and want some sort of "paint by numbers" instruction on where to put your fingers. The usual online TAB shows only finger positions, and not information about tempo, note length, dynamics, etc. So it's useless if you haven't heard the tune before. There are TAB programs that can include the missing info, but you don't see it around much.

TAB does have its uses though. Unlike piano, where every written note relates to a particular position on the keyboard, the same written note can be played in a number of different places on the neck of a guitar. TAB will show you which one to choose. However, as online TABs are submitted by all manner of people, they may be inaccurate anyway. It's handy to be familiar with both TAB and notation.

Good luck, and enjoy yourself. Guitar is a great instrument.

Cheers,

Chris

Hi Daren

Guitar is a great instrument; it has a tonal palette that is not surpassed by many others. I played classical for many years. To get the most out of that style, you will probably need to grow the fingernails of your string-plucking hand out a few mm past the tips of your fingers. That may interfere with your ability to play piano. Historically, some very accomplished guitarists played without nails, but my understanding that this was from being medically unable to grow nails, rather than a conscience decision to play without them. Obviously if you choose a style that can incorporate a pick, you don't have this problem.

I wouldn't bother trying to learn tab. While there are some hybrid standard notation/tab styles, the vast majority of tab only indicates the pitch of the note to be sounded, and says little if not nothing about the duration. Therefore, you'd need to have heard the piece before in order to play it solely from tab. I don't think there are any pieces that are only available scored in tab, so you're not limiting yourself by not learning it.

Further, as there are multiple places on the instrument to play the same note, the very act of choosing which one to play has consequences both in the relative ease of playing the passage as well as the actual timbre of the sound. For instance, notes played on the bass stings on the higher frets sound subtely different than the same notes played on the treble strings on the low frets. It can be very satisfying to determine which fingering works and sounds best.

I tried guitar a number of years ago but I have a small hand. I seemed to get a lot of buzzing when reaching for some chords and some muting due to the fingers touching against another string.

I would like to try guitar again (I have steel stings on an acoustic model.

I had some wrist tension when playing for a short period. Is that because I had not been holding the instrument properly. Any suggestions for those with the smaller fingers. I noticed those with long fingers were able to come down alomst vertically on a string, something I can't seem to do with smaller hands.

Every guitar beginner thinks that their hands are either too big, or too small. There are some advantages to bigger hands but because big hands usually also means wider fingers, not just longer ones, it usually makes some things harder and others easier. As with piano, some children with very small hands still manage to play guitar extremely well. Some guitars also have narrower necks if that feels more comfortable. The classical style nylon string ones have much wider necks, and tend to be played with a whole different stance and posture.

It takes quite a while before you can place your fingers accurately on the strings without buzzing and/or muting. It's much more about practice, and developing the right touch rather than hand size or sheer strength.

Guitarnoise is a great site for help, free lessons and articles, and general friendly help from people with a wide range of experience.

Guitarnoise Forums

Some of the lessons

It take a while to find your way around the site, but there's heaps there if you dig around.

Cheers,

Chris

You can probably get much more advice on a guitar forum, and I would not presume to say this is the only way to do it, but it's possible that by adjusting your LH grip (assuming that's your fretting hand) you can fix that. A lot of rock/pop players hold the guitar with the thumb coming over the neck, so as to fret the bass strings. Nothing wrong with that if you can get the sounds you want.

If you slide the thumb back, so that it rests more or less in the middle of the back of the neck, you may find it easier to get to the notes. You just have to experiment...

This is probably a bloody stupid question...


But can you play semi hollow guitars like accoustic guitars, i.e. without an amp?
I LOVE the sound of the 335s throuh an amp and whatnot, and I'd be inclined to get a cheapish clone, but... I know **** all about guitars, I'm trying to learn bare basics with an accoustic my friend left me, but yeah. I'd like to be able to play accousticly without an amp as well.

So would a semi hollow guitar allow me to do that?

As Late Beginner pointed out, tablature has its use but it's limited. If you already know how to read music, I'd certainly suggest that over tablature. By leveraging what you already know, you'll get a much faster start than someone (like me) who approached it without any sight-reading skills.

Once you learn the geometry of the strings and fretboard, it's a matter of muscle memory and finding fingerings that work for you.

Speaking of geometry, that's helped me immensely in playing the bass. Blues is generally based on a 1-4-5 chord pattern. That pattern when, when viewed on the fretboard (or fingerboard) looks like an inverted letter "L" or the shape that a knight makes on a chess board. This is why bass players are always asking "what's the root note?" Once that's found, the rest of the song is just playing over the chords, since the basic structure is already laid out. Find the root and you know where the sub-dominant and dominant are. Determine the general pattern of the line (1-3-5, 1-3-5-3, 1-4-6...whatever works) and you're off and running.

When the basic blues pattern is left behind and more of a jazz or rock improvisational thing sneaks in, it gets to be a little more interesting, especially when the bassist you're trying to follow (Larry "the mole" Taylor is a good example) decides to play a different pattern for each verse...well, roll up the sleeves and have fun!

Don't guitars transpose? They're C instruments, but as I understand it, when a guitarist plays C above middle C, what you actually hear is middle C. I'm not a guitarist so I don't know if this would cause any confusion when going back and forth from piano to guitar.

Since I play bass and not 6-string, I don't know the answer to this question. A quick Google search didn't turn up anything glaringly obvious, but I'd sure be interested in the answer to this just for curiosity's (and knowledge's) sake.

Not in the way that you are hoping.

All electric guitars can of course be played unplugged for practice, and I probably play my solid body electrics more unplugged than amped. But the unplugged sound of semi hollow guitars (and even fully hollow bodied archtops, unless you have a very good one indeed) has nowhere near the quality, tone, or volume of a proper acoustic. Most of them sound disappointingly thin and 'plywoody' unplugged. Great looking guitar the 335 though....

Cheers,

Chris

Yes, the guitar is technically a "transposing instrument" because the parts for guitar are written an octave higher than a piano. This is simply a convenience so that guitar parts will sit in the most usable part of the staff and not spend too much time on the harder to read ledger lines.

There's no problem at all with this, and many guitarist are probably not even aware that what they think of as middle C is an octave away from the middle C that you play on piano.

I can play guitar from the same score alongside piano, but if I play clarinet then I do need a different score. The "C" on my clarinet comes out as the Bb on a piano. The tenor sax also plays a B flat, but the alto sax on the other hand plays a (piano) Eb when the score says C. Much trickier!

Cheers,

Chris

Thanks, Chris. That fills in some blanks in the "music understanding puzzle."

Thanks, Chris, good to hear this from someone who plays a variety of instruments. Seems like one of the trickiest parts would be if you were composing for an orchestra that had, say, guitar, piano, clarinet, and alto sax. You'd have to make sure the score was correctly transposed for all of the different instruments. I'm just getting my feet wet in music theory so this would be quite a chore for me, but for composers and experienced musicians transposing must become second nature.

Well, I only claim to own a variety of instruments. I'm pretty rank on most of them...

You're right about composers soon getting the hang of it though. It takes a while to get your head round the fact that some instruments aren't playing the sound that appears to be written on their score, but doing the actual transposing is pretty straightforward. It just involves moving each note up or down by a fixed amount.

I'm not an expert on this, but with saxophones, for instance, there are numerous sizes ranging from a tiny sopranino to a massive bass version that's taller than the player! Sax apparently originally patented 14 variations. Because of the technical demands of making instruments of different physical sizes it seems that it's not practical to build them with the same fingering layout and still have them play in the same key.

On the other hand you want to try and keep things from getting too complicated. So all of the saxophones are designed to be be played with the same fingering. If you swap from a tenor to an alto you don't need to learn a whole new fingering pattern. You play the instrument in exactly the same way - if the score says middle C you press the same button(s), but you need to use a different score that makes the adjustment for each sax. As far as I know, most of the common saxes are Eb or Bb. The usual clarinet is a Bb, but there are also ones in Eb. There may be ones in other keys, but those are the ones I've come across.

It does take a bit of practice do do stuff like this though (copied from the sax entry in Wikipedia):



Cheers,

Chris