Hacker News Reader

Comment by arkaic | Hacker News Reader

Have been playing guitar off and on for over five years, no musical training. I found the best way to keep playing is to play along to songs you know, and routinely practice them every day. Hours go by without you even noticing, it's great.

What's hard, though, are things like actually moving to the next step. Are you even practicing correctly, continually pushing yourself to new heights, or are you defaulting to the riffs or melodies that you like to play because they're easier?

The hardest part for me, currently, is trying to learn music theory on my own. I've tried getting into the creative side, writing songs and melodies, but so far, that process isn't very fun at all because of my lack of knowledge in scales, chords, and progressions.

View on HN

> The hardest part for me, currently, is trying to learn music theory on my own

As someone who is currently learning piano and music theory as an adult, I can recommend the youtube channel of Shawn Cheek. This guy has posted something like 3000 videos on various piano and music theory subjects. A good starting point would be his series on the Circle of Fifths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdF-uIeM33o

I find this guy to be an excellent teacher, I like his teaching style, and could listen to his accent all day :)

I highly recommend at least learning the pentatonic scale. It's very easy, and it's the basis for most rock and roll lead guitar. If you're in the right key, you can noodle around on the pentatonic along to songs, and it will generally sound decent.

For learning chord progressions, learn all the basic major and minor chords, then experiment with putting them together. There's a lot of joy to be had in that simple exercise, and with practice, you'll start to get an intuitive sense about it. Once that starts to make sense, you can start looking into the more unusual variants on chords.

Also, lessons can be fun, especially early on, because a teacher can point you in a specific direction for practicing that will cause you to grow.

Try Yousician. It's an app for learning the guitar (I think they are working on adding the piano lessons). There are some theory lessons with practice sessions. I tried learning the guitar by tabs and accords of the songs I liked, but did not get too far. Yousician shows a clear skill progression (easy melodies->hard melodies) and provides some foundation for further learning and improvement. If only I had more time to practice :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com