Do(i)J and a Plan for Music

Some of you may have heard, may not have heard, but the Department of (in)Justice has seized the domain names and frozen the processors involved in payments, citing fraud and money laundering. It's a shame because online poker isn't illegal and the steps taken with UIGEA aren't approproaite, which forced the hands of these cites. To make a long story short, my secondary source of income no longer exists and I am less free as an American, but it gives me significantly more time now to improve my guitar playing. So that's a silver lining at least.

My question to you concerns how to go about learning and improving. My current plan stems from an intro to jazz book/DVD I have and it discusses the importance of learning your triads (as gx already pointed out) and also scales, so my plan is to know and get very familiar with these two portions of music, then learn many chord progression, and go from there.

Do any of you think this is a good first step? And if not, what would you suggest differently? Thanks.

Ya know, I see this all the time. What should I learn first? How should I learn things? To be honest, it's the same thing with studying.

Everyone has their own technique that you need to develop over time. I can't tell you how to learn, I can only show you where the material is. Depending on what you accomplish would determine what stuff you need to learn.


In the end, as long as you understand Keys, scales, chords, and rhythm, you can follow any learning process and be just as good as anyone on this site.



However, I do give you one thing that you must follow that I've started abusing.


BUY A METRONOME!!! that is all.

Yeah, metronomes are crucial. I used one for quite a while when I played drums.

Also, I saw your comment in your interview about how you learned yourself and am trying to formulate a plan based on your response and the response of others.

Find a well-respected Teacher in your area. No substitute for one-on-one interaction exists.

cs! Glad you're back man!

I agree about 1-on-1 teaching as well, but it isn't in my budget at the moment.

above anything you need to learn and memorize every note on the neck.mak.es things alot simpler

For us poor college students and grad students, this is quite difficult to afford :(

$50 a week is my budget for food... How could I spend that on a teacher?


And I wouldn't model what I did as the way to go. I had to go back to the beginning quite a few times to fix small things that I did wrong that wouldn't of happened if there was a teacher there.

Of course it helps if you know someone else who plays guitar who could go through the learning process with you. That's how I got through everything.

@Btimm,

Did you play poker to suplement your income or own one of these sites?

I love poker!

Also, I used to teach guitar in my hood. I would only get into the very basics of theory just to push the student in the right direction in terms of a cerebreal understanding of the guitar. I would mostly play and show the student what to do on the guitar. I would charge $30 bucks for a half hour. Most of the time we would go an hour though because I enjoyed it so much!

@ mac
I played to supplement my income. It was nice to do something I loved doing and instead of being a hobby that cost me money, it was something that was helping my family and me. I played on Full Tilt Poker, and the other two sites involved are Poker Stars and Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet (they merged). These are huge sites worth billions of dollars.

By the way, it is interesting to see that the DoJ takes this action a mere week after poker is legalized in Washington, DC. :o I don't find this to be a coincidence. I do think it will reopen to Americans after a long time and will be regulated and taxed by the US. I always paid my taxes on poker though. If I know one thing, it is that you should never mess with the IRS - it's not worth it at all.

is gambling legal in your home town? granted it's more difficult to go to the boats (that's what we call casinos in st louis. long story) to gamble than being able to do it from the comfort of home.

about what to study next... i recently found out a friend of mine from high school started playing guitar, too. i have been emailing him back and forth about it i think i'm a year ahead of him? and we're both hooked and talking about what we're learning. he brought up a good point, he said it's like math. there is so much to learn, and all kinds of different techniques to solve problems. you don't necessarily have to learn trigonometry before you learn calculous. that's just the way most curriculums teach it.

but it was a good point. do you need to learn your scales first? or your chords first? it doesn't necessarily matter, they are both fundemental aspects of guitar as a whole. just like trig and calc are both fundemental to mathematics.

teachers are good, but expensive. i'm seeing a guy for $40/week every other week for an hour. one guy i saw twice charged $35/half hour. another guy (a kid) charged $25/hour but he lived like an hour away.

i recommend finding a local guitar store. that way they have the resources that an independant kid doesn't have, but they also aren't too big box like guitar center. for instance, the place i'm taking lessons only has two stores in st louis. but they are also big enough that they host a jam night at a local bar/restaurant in the area for their students to play on stage.