best way to improve your guitar picking?

I own a guitar and I can play a couple simple songs and know a couple of leads but basically I suck out loud. For some reason tonight I am thinking that I want to start practicing enough to get decent at it. What do you guys who can actually play suggest I do? Should I practice a bunch of pentatonic scales? Playing the same few Johnny Cash songs I know over and over is not helping a whole lot.

 

I suggest you hire a 17 year old phenom from Hoggard High School to teach you. Tonight I learned bar chords. They's only one thing I can say about bar chords. They're tuff.


Go to guitarnoise.com. It's got some cool lessons. Also, I get my tabs from ultimateguitar.com and guitare-tabs.com. My tutor says play at least 20 minutes a day, not like two hours once a week. I really sucked before I started going to him. I have progressed in the last two months very quickly. Depends on how much you want it I guess. I'm loving every minute of it, even though I suck big time.

 

truer words have never been spoken. this is how I learned to play the standup ukelele

 

I smell a hint of sarcasm.

 

I smell catshit and aarvark piss with just a touch of wombat twat-sweat

 

You got it right about enjoying it, I've been playing almost forty years and don't enjoy it any more now than I did when I had zero skills. It's like sex of golf, you don't have to be great to love it.

Thelt:

Use Limewire or some other similar thing and search for instructional vids (it helps to go to legit merchants to find titles to search for). I got hours worth. There are .pdf fakebooks around too. It's a damned sight easier today than when I learned by picking up and dropping a needle on a record a hundred times, or Mel Bay guitar books.

To advance your skills you have to sacrifice some of the instant gratification of playing what you know and like for boring exercises. Try twenty minutes of those each day and play all you want afterwards for fun.

 

true dat. My tutor says there's fun time and work time. Work time sux cuz ur going above your ability. But ever since I learned bar chords, I've noticed the power chords are switching much faster now. Before, they were kicking my ass.

 

it's all just practice.
I still don't like playing guitar much, just because I've got 15 years on other instruments. You're not going to gain those years doing a couple things over and over.