I just purchased a Fretlight guitar to begin to learn.  I had wanted to learn for some time and now that I have more flexibility and resources then previously I want to try and make it happen.  I am interested in lessons as well and maybe talking to people on here or in the Cleveland area about music in general from production to sound engineering.  So anyone trying to learn an instrument as well or perhaps already play?

My first guitar book was a Mel Bay thing. On the first page it had a picture of a pick with the caption, "This is your pick". Then it had a picture of a hand with the caption, "This is your hand".

Unless you want to be a performer, I'd say, just play & have fun.

Thanks to the internet you have a myriad of tools at your disposal.  When I was a kid in the 80's, we used to wait for the latest Guitar player magazine, or slow down cassettes etc to learn solos.  There is a wealth of info on the web.  It's a great place to start.

It is, but try to play with others as soon as possible. You can develop a lot of bad habits if you play on your own for too long.

It is, but try to play with others as soon as possible. You can develop a lot of bad habits if you play on your own for too long.

This is true but then, Keith Richards...

Ferrari, you didn't mention if you had any music background at all. Are you just starting from scratch?

If you gave no musical background it's a steep hill to climb.  Guitar was the 4th instrument I learned and I had various mental blocks with it.  I never took lessons so I never learned every scale and I'm sure I play with really bad technique, however if I were to have some reason to get good I could pretty quickly. 

 

The main problem with "guitar players" is bad taste/ego.  They spend all their time learning to play leads.  The truly dominating guitar players are the ones who drive the band.  When you are playing, imagine the guitar as a percussion instrument and that the chords/notes/phrasing are ancillary.  Think way more about your strumming than whatever is going on on the neck. 

 

Keith Richards is a great example of this, but there are people who are less conspicuous but actually better at it.  All the guys who played with Elvis were awesome.  Basically anyone who can hold a crowd's interest just vamping.  Imagine it's 1973 and you've got 3,000 fat tourists waiting for fat Elvis to take the stage.  You're wearing a goofy western outfit, spotlights are dashing around the theater, and all you've got to work with is 2 minutes vamping on A.  Listen to those Live in Las Vegas records...2-3 minutes of the crowd crackling with excitement over that A leading into Blue Suede Shoes!

 

 

^what he said

anyway, ya gotta start somewhere

It is, but try to play with others as soon as possible. You can develop a lot of bad habits if you play on your own for too long.

This is true but then, Keith Richards...

Ferrari, you didn't mention if you had any music background at all. Are you just starting from scratch?

 

Starting from scratch!  Though I am not ignorant to the notions of arrangement and tone etc.  I cannot read music.

Imagine it's 1973 and you've got 3,000 fat tourists waiting for fat Elvis to take the stage.  You're wearing a goofy western outfit, spotlights are dashing around the theater, and all you've got to work with is 2 minutes vamping on A.  Listen to those Live in Las Vegas records...2-3 minutes of the crowd crackling with excitement over that A leading into Blue Suede Shoes!

 

 

 

I feel that way about say for example the 1969 London or Amsterdam recordings of Led Zeppelin doing Dazed and Confused with those monster Bass notes from John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page using a bow string on his 1959 telecaster before he switched to the Les Paul he bought from Joe Walsh.

There's no need to learn to read music to play most styles on guitar...  if you're just starting out, you'll should see a ton of progress for every hour you can dedicate. Learning songs by "decent" guitarists tended to be the most productive for me early on along with a good amount of reading up on theory and stuff in my copious high school spare time. What Jake said is a good place to start, although lead vs rhythm arguments are a deep deep rabbit hole that mostly depends on the musical style of any band you'd join. The biggest thing for a beginner is to spend ample time practicing to just getting your manual dexterity up and get used to the finger positions... and make sure you don't ignore using your pinky.

I think I might invest in weekly lessons to get some good tips on hand positions etc so as to avoid bad habit formation. 

They help. Like it's real important that you have your thumb on your fretting hand in the right place and position at all times. Teachers can monitor that situation and whack you with a ruler when you do it wrong.

 

Oh and play with a beat a lot, a song, drumbeat or most boring but most helpful a metronome.

Understanding what makes a chord & a scale will only help. Being able to slog through reading music can only help (no need to sight play).

That said, a friend of mine, once he got proficient, said that he had reached the point where he needed to forget what he had learned.

The era of Youtube...there's no better time to learn guitar!

I just checked out the fretline guitar.  It's definitely a helpful tool, I can see it making it easier to learn the entire neck in every key.  However, you still have to have some idea as to what the hell is happening with how chords fit together, and I'm not sure that it helps you learn intervals.  Being able to hear root to 4 or root to 5 or root to 7 or any other variation is really important.  Personally my ear can hear ascending intervals very clearly but I have trouble with descending intervals. 

 

Anyway, here is the Elvis guitar action I was talking about in my previous post...no bands today get that mischievous "chopping it up" feel anymore, it's very difficult to do, and you will gain a much more sophisticated rhythmic feel if you're practicing along with this cheesy stuff instead of, say, Korn:

 

A tough thing to force yourself to do is to just palm all the strings with your left hand for an entire song like this, and strum atonally with your amp cranked.  You'll get a sense for how you can drive any song by doing this and how to use muting and subtle feedback.  Again with any instrument (and I'm way better at piano than guitar) to get a really good sound you have to be thinking more rhythmically than about notes.