Guitar Nerds Anonymous

Wait till you a try a mandolin...

@JB that strat looks great. Glad you are getting on with it.

IMO where the neck joins the body and nut width have more to do with how cramped or open playing feels than scale length alone. My SG is 24" but has chonky neck, wide nut and 19 frets before the heel meets the body, as well as a cutaway that extends all the way to the highest fret. The Tele has 6 frets past the neck-body join which means you have to reach right over to reach them... which in practice means you really never go there.

To me the SG feels more "open" and accessible than my 25.5" fenders, both at the cowboy chord and dusty ends. Not better, just different.

My teacher is classically trained, has said once i have mastered good posture, correct playing for all chords and picking / strumming techniques, he will teach me every trick, every lick he knows. i figured that if i am going to invest circa £800 on lessons this year, then I want this to set me up to a very competent level to play jazz, funk, soul, reggae, rock standards

Hmmm... not many jazz, funk, soul reggae or rock standards were written or played by people with classical training or technique. I'm not saying your teacher isn't good... but if you want to play the stuff you mention, is a classical foundation the way to go?

If you want to learn that stuff, why not find someone who'll teach you that stuff? Sure you need a few rudiments, but sitting upright with your guitar on the "wrong" knee, thumb behind the neck and plucking the right hand in classical style isn't going to work for... well any of it.

for example, it's way harder to play loads of Hendrix stuff without using the thumb-over "barre" chord thing that any classical teacher will beat out of you.

I agree with all of this. Whilst a classical foundation on guitar is rarely bad thing, it is very far from the quickest route to a mastery of the popular styles you describe as your focus and if anything rather circuitous. You can learn musicality and theory whilst starting off with popular styles/techniques/rhythms etc which would be much more useful if that's what you want to play. The best route to progress is learning stuff you actually like listening to. It makes motivation through the tricky bits and the plateaus so much easier....

@fatberg really valid points you have made, my teacher plays alot during my lessons grateful that i turn up with a battered fender strat, he brings his equally relicked Gibson Les Paul and power amp, whilst the rest of his pupils are acoustic guitarists going through their ABCs, i have access to tons of stuff off-syllabus during these lessons and i am blitzing through it so i see this as a great investment, which I find very encouraging, and everything is relative around guitar playing we hit AC/DC Metallica Nirvana, Van Halen to Parliament and Funkadelic.

Unless i learn the correct way first, and this is just my opinion these lessons would be deemed meaningless. also he knows every Nile Rodgers and Bob Marley chord pattern as he is sn accomplished band leader and composer. the thumb-over "barre" chord thing by Hendrix will come in time, i have also studied Eric Gales playing style which I enjoy, posted previously

I love them both, but I think BM and NR probably used no more than 3 chord progressions for the vast majority of their tunes! 🤣

Bob does that classic reggae Minor - Major VII loop in so many of his songs...

If you learn Nile Rodger's rythm first and then spend a couple years looking at obscure chord shapes in open tunings you'll get to Johnny Marr, which is nice

this is true but is ain't just about chords, percussive finger technique and strumming are needed for playing NR tunes..

these chords were added to my homework last week

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@Fatberg

my teacher had noted early on that I have an aggressive style of playing, fast tempo, short duration, minimal instrumentation.. that is punk rock in any other language, i took that as a compliment :)

That's certainly true - but personally if that was what I was after I wouldn't go to a classical teacher to learn it! But, you've clearly found someone and something who works for you so more power to your fingers....

I think there are techniques in rock guitar playing that are probably complete anathema to classical technique, such as wrapping your thumb over the top of the fretboard and using a fretting finger to mute an adjacent string (I don't know, I'm not classically trained). On the other hand, I think being able to place your fingers precisely is going to be useful whatever genre you play in. More importantly I'd say the most useful thing from classical/traditional teaching is to absorb enough music theory to understand why chords look like they do i.e. which notes make up chords, rather than just learning shapes. Once you learn that, you realise that all the notes are all over the fretboard and that chords can be constructed in various different ways so that (i) they sound better and (ii) you don't have to fret them in ways that are awkward to you.

Agree entirely re the benefit of music theory in opening up your playing and understanding of an instrument! Switching between guitar, banjo and mandolin really did this for me, made me look at and eventually understand chords in a way I never bothered to do when just playing the guitar...

Hard agree. From my experience, this comes from the different tuning steps - the violin style tuning on mando/(Irish tuning)banjo totally altered how I visualised scale patterns

Agree on the theory. Training my ear to learn which notes give the quality to chords really helped me. And figuring out lots of different inversions.
I’ve got short fat fingers and large palms so thumb over a lot. Also way easier to comp bass lines on the e string.

absorb enough music theory to understand why chords look like they do

+1 i have the benefit of seeing guitar playing in musical sheet form, not a great example below, but for arpeggios I have time signature, picking style and a host of variation for finger picking (yep each finger/thumb has a Latin name) or using pick , some less natural but that type of challenge on my brain will be rewarded as I develop my own style

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Yep, different tunings generally really helped me break out of the structures of the original chord shapes I learned and start having to work out chord inversions/voicings etc.

My potential new teacher (Rachael Wood) got back to me and she is coming to me in 10 days or so. Her studio is being built/updated currently so she’ll do home lessons at no extra charge until it’s completed.
Rachael at work

Yeah they are when starting out - I was self-taught and it was only after a proper lesson after a few years later that I discovered I had my ring and pinky fingers the wrong way around

I THINK this is how Josh Homme plays too, and it's a part of how he managed to come up with that weird bouncy riff in No One Knows.

Which way around are they supposed to be?

For your classic Emaj shape barre chord, pinky should be on the D string. Makes it a little easier to reach the B string for a diminished 7th IMO
BEATO

So I actually do something the correct way?? Rare for me.

Me too!

No idea but this is what I meant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUTMbevcuy

My frets are a state. Are these kind of pads the best thing to use to polish them up if I want to avoid wire wool?
https://www.stewmac.com/luthier-tools-and-supplies/supplies/sanding-and-polishing/micro-mesh-soft-touch-pads