guitar sound??

Stick with it - what you see on the Promo Video is a mime; what's on the teaching Video may have been Scene 1 Take 126 rather than good straight out of the box; and what you see on the TV when Eric Clapton gets his mates together for a gig is the result of many years of solid practise.

Your amp is not part of the problem. It may not be a great amp, but it gets you started and it will serve until you have a better idea of what you want your amp to do (we'd all like an amp that made us play great.)

You gotta pay your dues, but the good news is that many things to do with guitar become much easier with regular practise.

thanx for the help !! iam in for the long haul !!i dont mean to a pain but the blues scale are the ones i will concentrate on ? is that right untill i get a good idea?i have no problem in practising as i have allday now,semi disabled but ,,, thats not important .i have the time but not the funds for a treacher so any tips ? thanx again ffor any help
al

yep. learn the blues scale, learn your major, minor and 7th chords, learn keep a solid rhythm going, and learn the licks of your favorites, and then you can start to improvise. you can google blues backing tracks to jam over, and you can find a bunch of video lessons on youtube of varying quality.
you will also want to learn the major scale, minor scales and mixolydian scale at some point, although those are used less.

I would also recommend that you look up the chord progressions of a few of your favorite (and simpler) songs. Learning a few chords is pretty fast and easy. You can sound musical and stay excited about playing guitar with just three chords!

Hi Alex, and welcome to GN! The blues is probably the easiest genre of music to get started in - and the hardest to master. But three chords - a I - IV - V progression - will get you started. In the key of A, that'd be A D and E. In the Key of E, it'd be E A and B. Start by playing around with the major chords....then try adding 7ths, especially on the V chord. In A, that's A D and E7...

Suggestion: buy a slide. Try a light-ish one to start with; open tunings are good, but you can have a lot of fun just messing around with the D G and B strings in standard tuning - and it'll sound like music from the word go.

Suggestion: try and learn a blues shuffle. There are lessons here that'll help you get started.

Suggestion: start writing your own blues songs. The 12-bar blues format is pretty easy....for example,

(A)I've started playing guitar, and I (D)want to play some (A)blues,
I've started (D)playing guitar, and I want to play some (A)blues,
I bought a (E or E7)book today, (D)full of Blues I can (A)use.(E7)

That's just off the top of my head - a lot of people around this website reccomend the "Blues You Can Use" books. Try googling that, see what you can come up with.

Good luck!

:D :D :D

Vic

That's just off the top of my head - a lot of people around this website reccomend the "Blues You Can Use" books. Try googling that, see what you can come up with.

I have it, and it's a good book (and CD), but it isn't aimed at a rank beginner.
I'd say it's more of an early intermediate level. IIRC, by the second lesson it has you using bar chords.

Have you looked at these lessons?
Or these?

And don't forget, you have spent 55 years *not* playing the guitar.
It's going to take some time to get good, and like most of us, we'll never be as good as those guys who have been doing nothing but playing guitar for the past 50 years. (unless you plan to live for another 50 years...) :wink: