BellaOnline Forums Career Musician Learning Guitar

I have always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. My boyfriend has many steel stringed guitars around the house and every time I tried to play one it sliced my fingers into ribbons and I gave up. This went on for many years.

Finally I made up my mind to get a nylon stringed guitar and give this a serious try. It had been a dream for so long that I really wanted to see if it was something I would stick with.

Here is the guitar I got with nylon strings.



I am SO happy with it. I can actually play it without my fingers falling off! It is like night and day. I try to play for 15-20 minutes each night, while Bob is playing a video game (I play quietly). I have several songs under my belt now! They all use common chords like C / D / E / G and so on, but it is progress!

Is anyone else out there learning guitar or thinking about it?

We just started today, I am ashamed to say that we have had our Guitars for over 4 years and have not touched them so we started with re stringing ours, have to start somewhere right ? Since I homeschool, we are using eMedia Guitar Method .

Wow, I've been playing with my guitar for 2 1/2 hours! I have a list of bookmarked guitar tab pages that I work through, playing each song. Some of them I have the YouTube video of the song bookmarked as well. I'm not using any method, I'm just learning the chords by looking at chord charts and then playing along with the songs. So far it's working out well!

Here's the songs I'm working on:

Brown eyed girl
patience (guns & roses)
margaritaville
me & Bobbee McGee
She Moves through the Faire (celtic)
boxer (Paul Simon)
Cecilia (Paul Simon)
This Love (Maroon 5) (this is a challenge )
Rockstar - Nickelback
re: Your Brains (awesome song, find this on YouTube)

So I play through each song. The two that currently really challenge me are This Love and re: Your Brains, I can only play maybe half the chords in each one of those, but I'm getting better with shifting my fingers to keep up

I got my guitar in September I think, and it's an Ibanez. What type do you have Crochet? Is it an acoustic or an electric? Mine is an acoustic.

Oh Bob says mine is an electric guitar too, it does have a way to plug in to an amplifier. A sensor is built into the bridge.

We have 2 cheap acoustic guitars, I didn't want to invest in anything too pricey to make sure we are really going to learn on them, HA and it's a good thing too since they sat around for that long. Once we do get going, I'm sure we will want to invest in a nicer guitar. We did pretty good today and it is fun. My Uncle is a Guitar teacher in Texas, wish he could come teach us, HA. He did tell us that the very main thing is to practice practice practice.

I have a question, should you have to tune your guitar every day ? We replaced the strings so could that be why it is out of tune. Today it wasn't out of tune by much but still just wondering if this is normal or just because we changed the strings.

My boyfriend Bob is a musician and he said especially when you put new strings on a guitar that they are "settling in" and will need retuning daily. I know on mine they definitely did. Then after a while they began to settle down and would stay relatively in tune although I did need to tweak it a bit.

I know when his band gets up to play that all the guitar players always tune their guitars before they start to it seems to be normal to me.

Howdy everyone,

You'll probably have to tune your guitar every time. For most of us we can probably leave the same set of strings on for a long time. But most studio players change their strings every day or couple days, if it's a long session, because they play so much that the strings start sounding dull.

I remember the first time I got a guitar and didn't know anything about it (I'm really a piano player anyway). I got an acoustic guitar and put on a set of strings someone gave me. Lisa, talk about sore fingers. I had accidentally put on electric guitar strings and they made mince meat out of my hands.

Seems I've done my share of ridiculous things. Like, in high school, I started to learn clarinet, and found out later I had put in the mouth piece upside down.

Well, you have to start somewhere!

I played clarinet in high school too! I gave that away long ago. I played piano when I was younger (and still do) and the guitar is new for me.

I am definitely improving! I try to play daily, even a little bit, I have the guitar sitting by the couch in the living room. I can play my "standard songs" now without really reading the notes but I have to get "quicker" at the chord changes.

Lisa you amaze me, your a woman of many talents!