If you have a rock solid foundation on the scales,chords and know how to build them and how to play them all over the fret board then you are ready to become a bluegrass or blues guitarist and you can play style or genre with ease. If not, then you have a long long way to go, buddy. Remember there are absolutely NO shortcuts in learning guitar.

I am a Travis picker, so here is how I got into it: Work on some of the patterns given in the link below. Get a non-syncopated pattern down so you can accompany a song with it. Then develop a syncopated pattern. If you are playing a steel string guitar you might want to use a plastic thumb pick and a brass banjo pick on your index and middle fingers. If you play a classical guitar, or have tough fingernails you can play bare fingered

Finally, try picking a melody on the top two strings. The open string chords in the key of C work well for this. Borrow a finger from the chord pattern to move or just lift to get the note you need for the melody, and develop finger independence – be able to use the index picking finger when the pattern would have you using the middle finger so you can hit the note you need for melody. This will be difficult and may take you a year to get it down cold.

Lessons will help greatly – but find an instructor who can teach ou what you want to learn.

Do not confuse strumming a few chords on an acoustic guitar with learning to play classical music on the classic guitar. The fingering technicalities on the guitar far exceed that of the piano. The piano has more than thirty pieces of hardware between the players fingers and the actual striking of the strings….much subtlety is lost in the action. The guitar is a chromatically tuned instrument, and the fretted fingerboard makes learning the intricacies of harmonic construction much more visual.

The guitarist is in constant touch with the strings, like a harpist, and all of the special effects (chromatic glissando, portamente, pull-offs, hammer-ons, mordents, single-string tremolo, etc) are freely available and make the music come alive. There is no complicated mechanism between his fingers and the beautiful sound production. Transcriptions of the music of Bach, for example, take on a clarity not possible even with the keyboard. But make no mistake, all of these techniques take many years of study and a well-qualified teacher is the best route.

Having said all of the above, and seeing how eager you are to forge ahead, I can at least recommend a self-study book to get you started:

"You Can Teach Yourself Classic Guitar" by Will Bay (a Mel Bay publication for about $12.)

Cliff E. (classic guitarist)

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