Wont be far in all honestyOriginally Posted by Ben_Sir_Amos
Thanks - yeah - it was great to see / hear him develop ... sadly he got lost in the teenage worlds of computer games and gave up
As to doing barres from day 1 ... I strongly advise against it ....
finger stretching and coordination - yes
chords - yes
songs - absolutely
but wait a bit for barres
Depends on:
Age?
What they are interested in?
What kind of guitar they have to practice with?
Circumstances under which they are starting to play guitar?
Interesting. I can remember the first time I saw a barre chord on a tab and wondernig how the hell anyone could possibly do that - just seems impossible when you first see it.
The exercise that got me going towards that was to barre two strings at around the eighth fret, and slowly move the finger down fret by fret towards the nut. Then when you can do that easily, do the same with three strings, then four, then five, then eventually all six.
Also I do remember that it was easier to get the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, fingers into position before worrying about the barre.
I'll definitely go easy though - no point overdoing it.
He's not far shy of 50.
He's interested in music generally, and a very intelligent bloke. Classic rock would be his favoured genre, but he's knows modern stuff too.
He has a very nice strat.
Tried to play a few years ago, got disheartened and gave up. Familiar story, I guess. Works for himself, and probably can find a fair bit of time to practice, if I can just get him to the point where its a lot of fun.
In which case you'll need to get to the root of why he became disheartened.
You could do all kinds of things really! Stick some really light strings on the strat and give him some really fun things to do, maybe even tune it to an open chord and just play around with a 12 bar blues for a week or two. Explore a load of options. If he's an intelligent bloke, the idea of options is a good approach because they can control what's going on.
Give him something that will make him want to pick the instrument up.
Way too involved and complex a subject to comment on in any real detail.
As one VERY general point; don't introduce chords too early. Plenty of single line work to begin with (scales, riffs etc.) to develop a reasonable level of dexterity and control in the fretboard hand, THEN try a few SIMPLE chords.
Above all, have fun!
I disagree! Start with power chords I say! You really got me in A ( a la Van Halen version) to start with. So lesson 1 is here is an open postion power chord and an awesome riff to go with it. Lesson 2 is take it up to the 2nd fret for when the song reaches the B chord. Lesson 3 is you can play nearly every rock song using that power chord on strings 3, 4 and 5, learn the rest of you really got me (E then D) then go onto his stones songs. You can't always get what you want is a good simple one, C and F throughout except for the one line which is D and F.
So at the end of the first session he can jam along to any song he's got the chords for.
@ bj
Have you taught a beginner to play using this approach?
I can't see it working tbh.
Sliding power chords with string skipping from 6th to 5th string roots ... plus right / left hand muting ... and an F barre chord at fret 1 as the first things to learn!
I don't see it working.
Hey Joe, using open chords to start, and the E minor Pentatonic (12th position) fr the solo.
Then when he's ready, change from open chords to Barre's. And the solo (improvised) can also expand into different scale shapes/positions.
And as BJ said get him going with power (5th) chords as they're plastered all over plenty of great songs.
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