Musical Background and Unique Struggles

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Hi All,

I’m new to this community and new to guitar. I’m curious what my fellow students are coming from in regard to background and what struggles they are having.

For example, I’m coming from a piano background. I already have a strong foundation in music theory including scales, modes, octaves, ear training, etc. But I am absolutely struggling with getting my fingers to go where I want them to go! I thought having dexterity from the keys would translate, but noooo.

I’m having a great time learning and Justin is a great teacher, but I find it fascinating how some things are definitely easier having the piano background and some things I absolutely have to start at Chapter 0.

So, what about the rest of this community? For those that are coming from a different instrument, do you find it easier or harder?

And for those that are brand new to playing music, what do you get stuck on that you find unexpected?

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Scott, I just had a year and a half of piano, but I have found that the advantages of the musical background become more evident the further I advance in Justin’s lessons. At least the problem you have now with finger dexterity are fixed by doing enough practice. Some people have problems or slowed down later because of lack of theory or ear training. I learned one song on the piano by rote many years ago, since it was beyond my grade level, just because I really wanted to - the intro to Morning Has Broken as done by Cat Stevens and played by keyboardist Rick Wakeman, CBE of Yes fame. Later when I recorded the on the guitar finger-style, I could still remember the rhythms of the intro from the piano and it helped to imnprovise a reasonable finger-style version on the guitar.

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Yes, I remember very well how challenging it was getting my fingers to go to the right place.

What helped me a lot were 3 things.

  1. Changing to a guitar with slightly wider string spacing (a 1 3/4 nut width)
  2. Choosing a simple song that had only A E and D chords using Justin’s anchor finger technique with his different fingering of the A chord
  3. Using Justin’s one minute chord change lesson.

Those struggles seem so long ago and so short but thinking back it took me quite a few weeks to get confident. Hang in there, the reward is so very worth it.

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There is a lot on this subject on the Internet. For example, I enjoyed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CEGCoxSt8U.

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I came from 30 years of piano and have the same story as you. I thought my finger dexterity and control would have made guitar much easier. But I struggled with them doing what I told them to do. It got better but still three years in it’s not as easy as I’d like.

I realized that for guitar to sound good, both hands have to be doing things right, which still isn’t a reality for me. For me, the two hands are improving in spurts at different rates and at different times. I refer to it as the hands improving like a see-saw, one hand improves a little while other doesn’t, then other one gets a little better, then the other, etc etc.

My hands are small and while no one wants to acknowledge that small hands have challenges, I have been dealing with fretting hand reach, fatigue and buzzed notes issues for the entire time.

Also brain fatigue and time constraints are major challenges. Boredom, not finding many songs I want to learn and not having a hard rock learning path have made my learning a bit of a drag.

I don’t remember ever dealing with any these things with piano. I wanted to learn classical piano, the lessons teach classical style from the very first lesson. Not so with hard rock and guitar.

Overall, I have zero issues playing to a metronome, understanding any theory concept, or note/chord progression memorization as that is all second nature to me.

But the hardest thing to me is knowing where the damn notes are because mostly you don’t want to play the guitar like you play a piano - in a straight line, you have to play in the scale boxes or within chord shapes and there’s…so…many…notes…so…many…scales…so many different places… I don’t know how anyone learns it all and uses it practically. That’s been my curiosity about guitar all of my life… Just… HOW???

ETA - find anothrr guitarist who is skilled and willing to be patient with you, if you’re the type to have a zillion questions and self doubts. If you have nobody then you’re just stuck with those doubts.

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Hi Scott, and welcome to a great community. You might like to pop over to Introduce yourself, as it will help you navigate this large site a lot easier, my friend, and you will find a lot more advice. Cheers, HEC, enjoy

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Hi all - thanks for all of the feedback so far! I feel like my original post came off a little whinier than I meant it! I’m actually having a good time practicing and learning, and I only stop because Justin (rightfully) cautions me to pace myself so I don’t cause injury.

I was just finding it fascinating on how some things translate from another instrument while others really are completely different.

This community has been great. Great to hear from all of you!

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This is it for me, exactly!

I find myself on one string and I naturally want to be like, "OK, well, this is a G, so I just keep moving down this same string and eventually I’ll get to an A. But no, I’m supposed to skip down to the next string. It really is an interesting difference and definitely takes a lot to rewire my brain.

I can’t help but laugh. I know it will take patience. Thanks for your comment.

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Interesting question. The hardest thing about guitar (at the beginning), is just teaching the fingers of both hands to do the correct thing at the right time. Form the chord, strum the correct strings, change the chord smootly, fret a note or two, pluck the same string that you have just fretted (!), etc. Getting the strumming to sound good (omg, this takes a while).

The mechanics of all this is very difficult. And playing the piano (or anything else) is not really going to make that any easier. Nor is knowing a lot about music theory.

I bet Mozart sucked at playing campfire songs the very first time he picked up a guitar (if ever) :wink:

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Welcome to the community Scott! My wife, @LongSufferingWife , started learning piano as a child and is now learning the bass. She found that some of the movements that are important on the piano are actually a disadvantage on the bass. She has to unlearn some of what she has learned for the piano and it is quite challenging.

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@Tarkisal Welcome to the forum Scott/

Every piano player I know struggles with learning to play the guitar more so than people with no musical back ground. The music theory is the same but the execution is totally different.

A piano is 2 dimensional like a sidewalk, you can go left or right. Where a guitar is 3 dimensional like a swimming pool. You can go up, down, left, right or sideways.
Also there are multiple places on the neck where the same note can be found for example there are 5 middle C’s on a guitar where there is only 1 on a piano.

The good news is there are only 5 major(modes) scales shapes that cover every Key, Where as on a piano every scale is different.
With practice you will get better and your figures will figure it out.

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Welcome scott
With joining only a month ago after learning to play after trying 20 years ago i can relate to the dificulty your having.
The practice routines on the website are such a useful tool just keep practising the chord changes trying to get 30 in 1 minute with and without strumming i found this helped building a muscle memory connection without trying to over complicate things.
Also i downloaded the song app which has helped tremendously building timing, chord changes and strumming, very much recommended as you can slow songs down.
1 month in and im playing along to 5 or 6 songs with 2 near perfect.
Hope the practise goes well.

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Tarkisal, what playing guitar had in common with other instruments was the music theory for me. I played 5 string banjo for a couple of years about 5 decades ago. I gave it up when life got in the way and I couldn’t find a good teacher in my area. I took piano lessons for 5 years from a pro teacher, and didn’t really get good training I found out later. I picked up a few things and still plink out a tune or two though. I still enjoy playing the piano. I got back into the banjo about 8 or 10 years ago, self-taught myself via books and DVD’s, and then took a great online course that accelerated my playing ability. They offered a fiddle and ukelele course, so I took those up as well. I got into guitar about 1.5 years ago, still play the other instruments, and I am thoroughly enjoying learning that as well. With string instruments, a lot of the technique carries over from one to another, whether it’s strumming or finger picking styles. The difference of course is the chord fingerings, but that varies from tuning to tuning as well even on the same instrument. After a while, I knew just where to go regardless of which instrument I was playing. It wasn’t until I was into the banjo for a couple of years that I discovered the piano keyboard notes were present from fret to fret on the fingerboard. My books and DVD’s didn’t cover that concept, probably because they assumed people wanting to play the banjo didn’t have a piano background. It would have helped me tremendously to know that. I enjoy playing for my own amusement mostly, although I do belong to a local ukelele group. The only thing I noticed when playing these various instruments is, on rare occasion I go for a chord on one of them and end up fingering the chord for another instrument. It’s rare, and I just laugh and move on. I know instantly what I did. It’s all good, clean fun for me. At 72 I’m not going pro. Maybe. You never know. Enjoy the fun journey.

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Quite frankly, I disagree. Without my knowledge of music theory from piano lessons as a kid, I would be so lost. Why do we play these chords together in a song again? What are sus or add chords? Why is there sus2, but also sus4, and it has nothing to do with fingers, or frets? What is that rhythm again, and why do we call it 8th note strumming? Why do we sometimes count to 4, sometimes only to 3, but others to 6? I think there are a lot of things that people who have played another instrument before take for granted, but that confuse anyone who has no musical background.

Is it more difficult to re-learn the numbers for the fingers when switching from piano to guitar, than just learn it like that from the get-go? Sure. Is it a bit weird to switch from the linear keys of a piano to the 3-d approach of the guitar? Of course. But at least you always have the linear keys as a reference to find the notes you need, unlike someone who does not have the white and black shapes of the piano keys burned into their brain.

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I didn’t have a terribly strong music background prior to guitar, but I did have some. And it’s somewhat helpful with core concepts. I played trumpet as a kid and the mechanics of trumpet are of zero help. Your left hand supports the instrument and that’s all. I did take a semester of piano in college and that was actually more helpful to me. At least that got my left hand doing something even if I had to limit it to playing chords because a semester wasn’t long enough for me to develop enough dexterity to do anything more than that.

My wife picked up ukulele pretty fast. Though she has a much stronger music background than I do. She sang in the church choir and was a flute player and drum major in high school and played in a flute choir after finishing her degrees. She likes ukulele because she can sing while playing her instrument. She has slowed her technique learning down some because with singing, she can’t play super complex stuff.

While I’m no expert on the subject and MUCH earlier in my learning than you are, my instructor likes to emphasize that you actually want to mix up how you play scales. Sure, learn the boxes and all. But ALSO learn the scales in a linear fashion (though maybe not at the same time). That way as you play, you can mix the concepts together for different voicings because if you always play the same shapes and patterns, you don’t sound unique or terribly interesting. FWIW, he has a jazz and blues background and pretty much plays everything by ear and feel at this point.

Personally, I’ve been working more on my rhythm and keeping up with others for the past several months than anything else. Improvement for me has been kindof subtle, but it’s noticeable when I show up to my guitar jam group. Sometimes I go to ukulele jams with my wife, but those irritate me because uke ppl have preferences for certain chord shapes (often easy chords for uke are hard for guitar, and easy guitar chords are sometimes hard on uke) so they usually play in different keys than I’m accustomed to. Plus, they often play incredibly fast and I just can’t keep up.

It’s time for me to change things up, though. I’ve gotten a bit bored with doing the same thing all the time and I should add some new challenges to keep the interest going.

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You say you disagree with me then write 2 paragraphs totally agreeing with the statement you quoted from my post.

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Stacy there are only 12 notes on a guitar just like the piano, they are just laid out differently and as for scales there are only 5 basic patterns for 99% of the scales.
If you can play the Major Scale in the E shape you can play every Major, minor scale, mode and arppegio in all 12 keys.
If you know the E shape barre chord you can play every Major, minor, 7th ect chord on the guitar.

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I genuinely don’t follow this.
One-dimensional is linear going left or right; or up and down the keys on a piano, or a string on a guitar
two-dimensional is planar; moving across different strings, as well as up and down their length on a guitar.
I don’t understand what you mean by ‘sideways’ for the 3rd dimension?

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The third dimension must be exploring the depths of a rabbit hole! :grinning_face:

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Well you could consider that the likes of playing bends adds a third dimension.

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