Being a better guitar player

[tenohfive]

I've been playing guitar for a few years on and off (more off) and everything I've learned has been self taught i.e look up tab, if it's reasonably easy then practice it endlessly until it sounds right. Whilst I've got a cheap electric my main guitar is a Yamaha electro acoustic. In terms of the music I play, it's goes from stuff like Metallica (granted, the acoustic sounding stuff like Fade To Black) to Tracey Chapman and everything in between.

Recently I've got back into it in a big way though and I'm looking to improve but I don't really know where to start. Is it worth learning some theory, or learning songs to improve certain techniques - or what? I'm not planning on just improving - I still want to learn new songs for the pleasure of playing them, but having something else to work on that'll help me pick up techniques or just make it easier to learn songs in general would be good.

Does anyone have any suggestions on where I should begin?

[tenohfive]

Any particular chords? I can play most major and minor chords without looking (although I still struggle with a clean F at times), plus a few others that I've picked up along the way. Is there some sort of guide as to the most common ones? As it stands I tend to learn a chord for a song, and just practice repeating it in order of how it's played with a single strum until I can change smoothly.

Are there exercises that can be done with a metronome? I understand the importance of timing (in vague terms) but not how I can improve my timing generally.

[tenohfive]

Alfanatic said:

www.justinguitar.com .

That looks ideal - exactly what I was looking for, something that I can drop and and out of.

[tenohfive]

I am, and it's always with people who are much better players than me - people who can pick up a new song or riff quickly, so I always feel like the weak link.

[tenohfive]

Practising a given song is all well and good (and not something I'm planning on abandoning) but learning different techniques, increasing my strength and dexterity and understanding why certain songs are played a certain way can only help. I've spent the last 6 or so years making it up as I go along, and I'm nowhere near as good as I would like to be. If learning some of the proper technique means that I'll be able to pick up songs quicker and play more complicated stuff then it's completely worth it.

And it's not all work - I've started on some scales and I'm actually enjoying it in an odd way.

[tenohfive]

One thing I do find confusing with the way he lays things out - he talks about the strings up side down to the way (from hundreds of internet tabs) that I've come to think of it i.e eBGDAE instead of EADGBe. Which seems completely counter intuitive to me. So when he talks about putting your finger on the third string he's talking about D, whilst I'm reaching for G.

Unless I've been thinking upside down for the last 6 years (a real possibility.)