YAY!

I bought a guitar!! And a couple songbooks, and a music stand, and a guitar stand, and a strap. 😛 I'm so fricking excited...I can't wait until it gets here. I ordered it through Musician's Friend. I ordered the least expensive one I could find, and I plan on using it to learn on...until I can afford a "nice" guitar. 😛 It's a Rogue Acoustic Dreadnought. I don't know anything about how to play the guitar, except I know one thing that my best friend taught me years ago: the intro to "come as you are", by Nirvana. So anyway I bought some classic rock songbooks and a chord book to help me learn, I only ended up spending a little over $ 100. Actually to be precise it was $ 123.80, for everything. I tried to get the very cheapest of everything, intending to only use the stuff until I'm good at playing and therefore worth spending more money on. lol. Yay I'm happy! 🙂 I wonder how long it will take before I can play Stairway to Heaven....

Look, here's my new guitar!

Here's the one I'm going to buy when I get really good 😛

I also got this:

And this one too:

Sorry, I'm just so excited I had to show you all!! lol.

grrr, it won't be here for 3-4 days. Oh I can hardly stand the wait.

Hey, it's a good idea to buy a cheap one first, that's what i did. Actually, that's what i did AFTER i bought an expensive one and realised i was in too far over my head. The Maton's are nice too. I'm gathering that is what your new one is going to be.

LG, right on, thanks for the support! I hoped I was making the right decision going with the cheaper one. What happened with you is pretty common, btw - I read on a website that MOST people go with one that's expensive right off the bat, only to find out it's too much to handle for a beginner. You are not alone! lol. Maton's I'm not familiar with, but remember, I know NOTHING really. I'll look up the brand though. I believe the other one is a Gibson D10Q with a quilted maple top, black binding, and mahogany sides and back. I figure that'll be a good "second" guitar, it's under $ 300, which is about my limit (lol), and it's PRETTY! 😛 Gotta have the pretty.

How long have you been playing? And, how cool that you play! 🙂

Oh, is that a Gibson? I couldn't read the logo.

I don't really play that much anymore. I picked it up when i was a teenager and used to jam with a friend in her garage. She played drums, i played electric. Then i sold it and bought a bass. Played around on that for a while then sold that. Then a few years ago i bought another guitar (a really good one) and took up lessons again. Then i realised i was too far out of my league, sold it and bought a cheap acoustic. About 6 months after that i bought another bass guitar, a cheap one and took lessons on that as well. Then i did my usual "im over this" and gave the lessons up for both, but i still have both. It's cool tho cos i feel that if i picked up either one it wouldn't take me long to learn again. Only a few weeks. Once you have that knowledge it comes back to you pretty quickly. I didn't learn that much, just enough to be able to play the songs i liked and to muck around.

These days i have far superior technologically musical apparatus. I use music programs to create music from scratch. It's kind of like having a band in a box, infact that is the name of the most basic type of program, "band in a box".

It is a Gibson, I can't read the logo either, I only know it's a Gibson because it's on the musiciansfriend.com website so I just copied the picture from there. 😛

That sounds like so much fun, jamming with your friend in the garage...my friend (coincidentally he's coming from down under) is a bass player in a band in Sydney and he said when he visits he'll teach me some basics, etc. Someday when I have the $ $ I'd like to have one of those music programs you're describing. I've looked at them before and they look like fun!

That's awesome that you can just kinda pick up from where you left off, once you learn how to play. I KNOW that I'm going to hit some roadblocks and frustrations (you're talking to someone who can be kind of a perfectionist)...I just know it -- but I am determined to force myself to learn and not give up when I get frustrated. Learning how to play any musical instrument is hard, at first. I remember when I first tried to play the clarinet, it was VERY frustrating because you can't just pick it up and play a song; you have to learn how to train the muscles in your mouth and tongue to do certain things to produce the right sounds, and you have to then learn how to control your air flow, while keeping rhythym, while coordinating all of that with your fingering. But once you get pretty good at it, all that frustration becomes worth it. It's just a matter of persevering when you'd like to chuck the thing across the room. But, I can only say so much about persevering because it didn't take me long at all to decide the saxophone and I were not going to get along. lol.

Alright so my guitar arrived last night...(yay)...I immediately liked the sound of it right out of the box but quickly realized it wasn't in tune so I fumbled around with the tuner a little and did the best I know how to do, mainly just going by what sounded good/didn't sound good.

I played for a couple hours last night (and by played, I mean stared at my chord book and considered tearing it to shreds, then decided to calm down and remember that I've never really played a guitar before, so suck it up and realize that right now I suck, and the only way to get any good is to give it a try). I then realized that the big book of classics is WAAAAAAY too advanced for me, it's all in this maddening "tablature" that makes NO sense AT ALL to me, so I tried to put it out of sight and mind, I mean I couldn't even play one note out of that book because it's got no instructions whatsoever in it. The second book is very basic, but as far as just showing the basic chords I guess it's fine, picture-wise (but nothing the author actually SAYS makes any sense to me yet).

I've run into a few problems already:

1) Just like I suspected...my hands are too small to do certain things, especially difficult chords that require serious stretching of the fingers.

2) I'm having trouble *only* pressing down the necessary strings on the fretboard, it's like my fingers don't want to bend sharply enough to make it so that only my fingerTIPS are fretting a string. So then when I strum through, I get weird buzzing/bad sounding notes that aren't supposed to be there. To try to avoid this, I stopped strumming for a while and took my strumming fingers and put them on my fretting fingers to FORCE them to bend at the right spots. This helped a little actually; the next time I strummed through my fretting fingers did a little better at bending properly and therefore producing better sounds. But when I've been playing for a while, my fingertips get REALLY sore and tired, and then they can't press down the strings as well, and I get the icky sounds again.

3. Strumming has its own set of difficulties; sometimes I get this yucky BUZZZZZZing sound, but I can't figure out why it's happening or where it's coming from. And then sometimes no buzzing sound at all. And sometimes I'm not able to only strum four strings at a time, or five, or what have you - I suppose there's no rememdy for that except practice.

4. My back hurts like hell because I am completely bent over my guitar so that I can "see" what I'm doing (because there's no way in hell I can do anything w/out looking).

5. My fingers look like they've been burned - the index/middle/ring fingers on my left hand feel horrible, there's this constant stinging sensation - and the steel strings on my guitar don't help matters. lol. Also DAMMIT - the C chord is really hard for me! It feels like the first and second strings on the first fret are wound up tight enough to slice the tips of my fingers off, but yet my tuner says they're tuned right.

6. I don't know if my wrist position is wrong or something, but I suddenly feel like I have carpal tunnel...

😢 I know, I know...I'm being a big baby. But this is HARD. Even with all these probs, I'm still really jazzed that I *can* learn to play. Eventually. Unless my fingers fall off...BTW, I can *only* truly play one chord well so far, and that is the easy-ass E minor chord. lol.

Oh, and I played from the time I got up this morning and until about 3 hours later. Ouch...

Oh and here's something weird that I feel like an idiot for asking, but I really need to know cuz it's bugging me...

How exactly is a woman supposed to hold a guitar?? Without it being...uncomfortable....? lol, I hope you understand what I'm saying. Right now I'm practically holding the thing so it's laying flat on my lap, because I'm struggling to SEE where the frets and strings are, etc. But how am I *supposed* to hold it? Just any old way? Because whenever I attempt to hold it the way I THINK the professionals do, it's pretty big and it feels pretty awkward.

I have another question - is it normal to have sore shoulders and a sore neck? It feels like I've been weightlifting...lol

Well, if you are doing something different to what you usually do the muscles in your body will always hurt for a while until you adjust. When you get lessons your teacher should tell you how to hold it etc... I think my guitar must be small because i haven't had the problem of it feeling uncomfortable. Is there any way you can exchange it for a small one?

In regards to the finger problem, your fingers will probably hurt for the first two weeks but after this they will toughen up and develop calauses (is that the right spelling? Duncan, SPELLER PLEASE). It's really freaky though cos when your fingers have stopped hurting and are about to toughen up your fingertips actually peel off. But then you have a whole new fingertip that is strong and you can play for hours and won't feel a thing. It's really cool when this happens, it's like that hurdle you have to get over. Also, your fingers will begin to get stronger. I'm thinking that the instrunment is too big for you. I just pulled my guitar out and it's pretty small. You've got to be careful buying online cos you don't get to try the things out for size first. See if you can exchange for size. With regards to being a chick and playing, i don't find any discomfort.

K, so the pain is normal, that's good, I was hoping that was the case. As far as the size thing, I had originally planned on getting a "3/4" size guitar, because I knew I was gonna have problems with a full-size one, but the reason why I went ahead with the full size is because I kept reading about how you can never truly get the same sound from a smaller guitar (but who knows if that's true, I'm sure if you spend big bucks on a small one you can get perfectly fine sound), so I thought I'd just learn to deal with it. My plan is to give it another couple weeks, and if by then it still feels like I'm holding a giant alien, then I will definitely exchange it, I'll have to or playing won't be enjoyable enough for me to want to continue. Also they don't make this particular model at the price I paid in a smaller size, so it may not even be possible for me to exchange for a smaller one. I'm gonna try to give it a chance, but I'll have to do something if I still can't manage it very well after a couple weeks.

I find the whole fingertip thing to be fascinating! I'll have my new fingers in a couple weeks, yay!

Oh, p.s....I can't afford lessons. I've been relying heavily on this site called www.guitarnoize.com, because there's all kinds of free info for beginners on there. I'm going to try to learn as much as I can online/for free, then if I'm really struggling I'll have to take lessons. When I have enough money. My friend from Australia said he's going to teach me some basics. He plays bass, are the two instruments drastically different from each other? The last time I saw his guitar was like seven years ago when he was still kinda learning too. I think I remember that bass guitars have fewer strings...right?

My advice, for what it?s worth: Take at least one lesson to start with just to learn to adjust the strings, get to know THE TONE, that?s the basic for your guitar to sound right. Then you get some beginners lesson notes, (the best ones are those given to guitar students from their schools,) spend a few months learning the basics, in solitude if you aren?t ready to pay the lessons. When you can play the classical Green Sleeves finger for finger on your strings (including the bass strings) it?s time to buy lessons. You will have fun, the guitar isn?t the easiest instrument to play but it?s worth the pain and effort.
Good luck.

Well thanks Turtle! Every bit of advice anyone's willing to share helps A LOT, because I have no idea what I'm doing. I really appreciate the tips.

I might take a break from playing today because my wrist is bugging me, and I really don't want to make it worse...perhaps I'll play for just 15 mins or something (my bass player friend told me to play EVERY SINGLE day for at least 15 mins, so I assume it's important).

One more tip, if your wrists hurt you aren?t handling the guitar right. It?s the fingertips that?s supposed to ache!
Loosen your wrists - shake both hands and then hold the guitar ever so softly - you?ll feel the difference right away.

Really? I will try that. I had a feeling I wasn't holding it right. You know the more I think about it the better it sounds, getting a smaller guitar, like a 3/4 size. I just don't think I'm going to be able to press down the frets hard enough without twisting my wrist all around to reach them...

Yes, a smaller guitar might suit you better if your hands are small. Your fingers on the strings are supposed to dance along the neck and you can?t do that if your hand or wrist is holding the guitar in place. You might also try to hold the guitar closer, it gives a shorter reach.

Thanks Turtle! 🙂