Thinking of Taking up Guitar - Any tips ?
- Thread starter kingrollo
- Start date
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Which coincidentally was announced on April 1st!
Oops. Well spotted!!
Although it has occurred to me that on a good digital studio piano you could, if you wanted, create a left handed piano patch just by reversing the tones.
Grant Fondo
Guru
- Location
- Cheshire
MontyVeda
a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
- Location
- Lancaster... the little city.
very nice guitars for the price.
If you're finding fretting is hard work, then my advice is buy a set of standard electric guitar strings and put those on. The lighter gauge makes things far more pleasurable. It also mellows the volume quite nicely too. I don't think I'll ever go back to using proper acoustic guitar strings.
ColinJ
Puzzle game procrastinator!
- Location
- Todmorden - Yorks/Lancs border
I have a (pretty rarely used) Tanglewood steel-strung acoustic guitar to keep my (pretty rarely used) Yamaha nylon-strung classical guitar company!very nice guitars for the price.
If you're finding fretting is hard work, then my advice is buy a set of standard electric guitar strings and put those on. The lighter gauge makes things far more pleasurable. It also mellows the volume quite nicely too. I don't think I'll ever go back to using proper acoustic guitar strings.
If/when I ever get round to restringing the Tanglewood I might give that a go.
Grant Fondo
Guru
- Location
- Cheshire
Not many of us can afford Martin guitars (gulp! is that a typo?)
Luckily the strings are slightly cheaper
Luckily the strings are slightly cheaper
To be fair, they do also have guitars in the $549 to $600 range also.
DCBassman
Guru
- Location
- The lumpy far South West
I once had a huge coffee table book called Martin Guitar Masterpieces, full of custom and signature models like this. Ugly. Rather have the unadorned guitar.
MontyVeda
a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
- Location
- Lancaster... the little city.
Not many of us can afford Martin guitars (gulp! is that a typo?)
View attachment 668858
Luckily the strings are slightly cheaper
View attachment 668859
They're nice guitars... but
You pay £3-400 for the guitar and the rest is for the name. The stupidly expensive ones have lots of ornate inlay, which lends nothing to the sound. You're best off just buying a solid top Yamaha.
DRM
Guru
- Location
- West Yorks
View: https://youtu.be/0m0vVubKXtY
Then of course there’s expensive guitars with a history that is utterly mind blowing
View: https://youtu.be/G8UunQzuONQ
GuyBoden
Guru
- Location
- Warrington
delb0y
Legendary Member
- Location
- Quedgeley, Glos
I have two Tanglewoods that I use when I do acoustic gigs. I play them at home more than my Martin and my Furch, too. They're great guitars for the money.
One of my fondest memories was attending a course in the Lake District when I was about 18. I was on the Opera course but there was also a Concert Pianists course. After the days workshops and teaching we would repair to the bar and I would sit down and play the piano for anyone who wanted to murder showtunes etc.Being able to play anything by ear is the best skill IMO.
One of the chaps on the concert pianist course came over to me and told me how he'd love to be able to do "what you can do - I just don't know how people can do it". It stunned me to this day that someone who can play Rachmaninoff and other highly technical concert pieces could not just sit down at a piano and play.
It's a skill I've always taken for granted.
winjim
Straddle the line, discord and rhyme
I can play piano and guitar, and read music, all very badly and vaguely remembered from a long time ago.
I would be able to play piano from sheet music but I wouldn't be able to sit down and just knock something out. Conversely, I can't transfer sheet music to playing the guitar, but I can simply sit and play a tune, certainly make up a chord progression at least, and keep it all in key. It's to do with the way I learned each instrument, and also I think that the piano is linear while the guitar is more pattern based.
I don't think there are that many guitar players who play from sheet music anyway, certainly not traditional notation.
I think that line in bold is *really* important and it's a real bugbear of mine. I was very very lucky that my first piano teacher was a very lovely lady who did not discourage me from playing about with my piano pieces. We had an agreement that as long as I could play the piece properly for her that I could then also play it the way I thought it should go. I absolutely loved taking a piece and jazzing it up and was very much encouraged by this approach.
I then moved to a school piano teacher to do some grades - she was Czech and was the traditional Victorian style instrumental teacher including smacking your hands with a ruler for mistakes and clipping nails that were too long. "I cannot listen to the click click - these nails are too long". I quit piano lessons. My parents then found a new more relaxed teacher again and I pretty much thrived until Grade 8 when I had the realisation that I could play what I want and JS Bach was not what I wanted.
Part of the problem with music teaching (and a lot of teaching in general - we should ban closed book exams and allow kids to use the internet IMHO) is that we still teach like we are Victorians. Kids these days have more access to music than we have ever had and there needs to be much more focus on using your ears. There is no need to learn to play a piece solely from music notation. If I can hear a piece first, it helps me sight read the actual notation by giving it a musical form. I was always baffled by ABRSM Grade 8 singing requiring you to sight read without an accompaniment. Who sings a song from sight without any accompaniment? The skill is in using the accompaniment to work out the notes in advance of singing them.
I find the piano very pattern oriented as well but in a different way.
