I can remember when I started playing the guitar and how challenging even the simplest riffs seemed at first. What sparked your interest in picking up the guitar? For me, it was a desire to be able to play Led Zeppelin songs, or whatever music I’d hear and like and want to be able to recreate myself. That was the driving force for me in the beginning. After a while I got good enough to noodle around a little more, but it all began with the fascination the simple guitar riff had over me. I’d hear a song and have to get my guitar teacher to show me how to play it. As my skill improved, I got to where I could ‘pick’ things off of a record myself, by listening to it (sometimes repeatedly) until I got it down.

Perseverance furthers when it comes to learning the guitar; there is inevitably a certain amount of difficulty at the beginning (much of it is due to the physical adaptation your hand muscles have to make at that stage, as well as the development of callouses on the fingertips.)

So, why do you want to learn how to play the guitar?

What do you hope to learn how to do, and which style appeals to you most?

There are some guitar players who would be at a considerable loss with no use of finger-picking style. Sometimes I like playing songs that use this technique. I first learned how to finger-pick when I was taking lessons from Larry Hoffman. When the right hand isn’t finger-picking or strumming, I pluck patterns on various strings with a pick. This can often add an interesting element to your playing (you can even get a few of those picks that attach to your picking fingers and thumb if you want to try and get the best of both worlds.)

The idea is to let the thumb cover the “walking bass” part of the pattern, and to let the other 2-3 fingers cover the rest. You can see a good example of this in the video I made playing “Bron-Yr-Aur” by Led Zeppelin. Of course, the guitar was tuned to an open C tuning, but you can get the idea.