Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

adamharkus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 239 posts

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#151

Post by pcsanwald »

I've been a professional guitarist since I was a teenager, and switched to upright bass about 3 years ago (I'm 40).

The biggest advantages to learning as an adult is on average you are going to have money to pay for lessons and a decent instrument, and are probably going to be more organized in terms of practicing and all that.

The disadvantages are that it's harder to network and find others at your level to play with. And, to be clear, the way to get good at, and enjoy music, is to play with other people. Even one-on-one lessons are a form of playing with others, and many adults use lessons as a proxy for playing with others.

Playing with other people was a very easy thing for me to do when I was coming up, and I'd imagine it would be significantly harder for an adult. But, I believe it's critical to enjoyment and success in music.

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#152

Post by philbarr »

DanHulton wrote: post #63
beat wrote: post #41

As someone who has been playing for 35 years or so, here are some observations... First and foremost, guitar is a pretty straightforward instrument for beginners. There's a reason it's the most popular instrument in the world. If you put in the effort, you can be playing something musical in a few months, and proficient in basic folk/rock music in a couple of years. It doesn't take "talent". It just takes effort. Som…

What is involved in getting your guitar "set up" anyway? I'm looking to get back into learning the guitar I bought a few years ago, and I mean it sounded fine to me when I brought it out to check on it, after a tuning, of course.

Something not mentioned so far is a fret dress. This is where the truss rod is completely loosened, strings off, and the neck clamped. The frets are then filed down to make sure they are all the correct height and then polished. Make sure when you ask for a set up it includes a fret dress.

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#153

Post by azakai »

beat wrote: post #41

As someone who has been playing for 35 years or so, here are some observations... First and foremost, guitar is a pretty straightforward instrument for beginners. There's a reason it's the most popular instrument in the world. If you put in the effort, you can be playing something musical in a few months, and proficient in basic folk/rock music in a couple of years. It doesn't take "talent". It just takes effort. Som…

> Picking is much harder than fretting.

Is it? I've been playing classical and folk for a long time and I think picking is far, far easier.

Maybe picking is harder in other styles, like electric guitar?

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#154

Post by analog31 »

amelius wrote: post #42
mattparlane wrote: post #30

If you are interested in learning /music/ and not just learning the /guitar/, I would strongly encourage you to start on the piano. I started on the piano and moved to the guitar later, and I've now realised that the piano gives you such a good musical grounding, so much better than the guitar can. There's nothing quite like having it all laid out in front of you. It's the only way that things like sharps and flats m…

I find the piano quite illogical. Playing a chromatic scale requires to jump from white to black keys. The guitar with its "basic" strings is actually much closer to the underlying physics (and thus mathematics), imho.

In my view the "logic" of any historical instrument emerges as you gain experience. You eventually reach a stage where you can think and hear the music in your head, and it comes out of the instrument. At this point, the pianist finds "shapes" of their hands, that correspond to what they want to play. So in a sense the arrangement of the keys is a kind of memory aid.

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#155

Post by nnd »

What do experienced guitar players think about apps like Youcisian (which are basically interactive tabs with timing assistance and learning feedback)? Do they actually help in understanding the instrument and music composition?

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#156

Post by ams6110 »

ntumlin wrote: post #65
StevePerkins wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're middle-aged, and still all that "motivated by popularity", then you're not doing middle-age right. A 50-year old playing guitar is 1,000x cooler than a 50-year old mixing EDM tracks on Ableton, because he thinks it'll help him score 20-year old chicks or impress HN. No matter what age you are, "adulthood" is pretty much another word for finally having enough self-confidence to do your own thing. It's pretty…

>A 50-year old playing guitar is 1,000x cooler than a 50-year old mixing EDM tracks on Ableton, because he thinks it'll help him score 20-year chicks. Corollary: A 50 year old mixing EDM tracks on Ableton because he likes it is just as cool as the first guy.

A 50 year old mixing vinyl with turntables and an analog mixer is cooler.

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#157

Post by JustinAiken »

acomjean wrote: post #66
baby wrote: post #51

Can't you ditch all of that and use one of these cool new programs where they show you where to play on the guitar, you play in there, and the mic detects if you played correctly then proceeding with the next note? I think RockSmith is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaHsqGSetVo I think there are others that might look more pedagogical.

Rocksmith works with Bass and Guitar and is a lot of fun. Its basically rock band with real instruments. It has some basic video lessons too. The guitar usb cable works with other programs too, though the reverse is not true (you needed to use the rocksmith adapter cable with the program). melodics is the software to learn finger drumming (though they're adding real drums to the software).

> you needed to use the rocksmith adapter cable with the program

There's a nocable patch for PC, and for Mac you can create an aggregate audio interface named "Rocksmith USB Cable" so you can use any interface you like - it's much funner with Apogee gear than the toy cable!

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#158

Post by billconan »

marsrover wrote: post #18

I'm 29 and have been playing guitar for at least half my life at this point. It's a great stress reliever and just fun in general. I'm not good by any stretch of the imagination, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying myself. These are some of my personal recommendations for starting out: - Use an acoustic, you don't want to have to carry an amp around with you. - Learn to sing while you play early on. I think it's h…

is classical guitar a good beginner choice? I heard most people recommend electric guitar, but I want to learn to play fingerstyle.

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#159

Post by Lon7 »

baby wrote: post #51

Can't you ditch all of that and use one of these cool new programs where they show you where to play on the guitar, you play in there, and the mic detects if you played correctly then proceeding with the next note? I think RockSmith is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaHsqGSetVo I think there are others that might look more pedagogical.

RockSmith is a fun tool to practice with but I'd be very hesitant to recommend someone use it as a method to actually learn the guitar.

The biggest problem is that by learning differently, you create a real barrier between yourself and other musicians. Most guitarists learn to play in a somewhat similar manner. You learn to follow along with music and play by the tab or sheet music. The feedback you get is solely from your own ear. You learn how to stay on tempo and key from auditory cues, not visual ones. RockSmith changes all this.

RockSmith is useful to practice really difficult passages, but it becomes a major crutch at all other times and I really can't imagine someone become a well rounded guitarist while depending on it.

Re: It's Never Too Late to Learn Guitar

#160

Post by jdietrich »

olivermarks wrote: post #71
beat wrote: post #41

As someone who has been playing for 35 years or so, here are some observations... First and foremost, guitar is a pretty straightforward instrument for beginners. There's a reason it's the most popular instrument in the world. If you put in the effort, you can be playing something musical in a few months, and proficient in basic folk/rock music in a couple of years. It doesn't take "talent". It just takes effort. Som…

tldr: buy a guitar whose neck fits the size of your hands. Excellent points by @beat. One other aspect for new guitarist is neck size: if you have small hands buying a guitar with a 'baseball bat' style rounded neck makes it very hard to play barre chords and difficult stretched chords. Conversely large hands and fingers need a longer fret board and deeper neck.

I'm not entirely sure about that. I have very small hands, but like most jazz guitarists, I have a strong preference for a relatively fat neck profile. A guitarist's fretting hand is effectively a class three lever, with the thumb as the fulcrum. If your technique is even remotely correct, a very thin neck gives you less mechanical advantage when fretting.

I think that the key beginner mistake is gripping the neck like a baseball bat, rather than simply using the neck as a place to rest your thumb. The wonderful Toone/Strandberg trapezoid neck profile suggests that the conventional wisdom on neck profile might be utterly wrong.

I do strongly advocate short scale lengths - most women and teenagers should at the very least lean towards a Gibson-scale instrument and may be better off with something in the 22" to 24" range. IME a lot of female guitarists gravitate towards using a capo on the 3rd to 5th fret, partly because it brings the guitar into a more appropriate register to accompany the female voice but primarily because it gives them a shorter effective scale length.

Post reply on HN