The debate on what strings you should use on an electric.
Depends on a few different factors. If I could go back and tell my younger self however, I'd be looking at heavier gauge as opposed to light.
Stay with me here - I got a Jap-Strat in my younger years and learning on it was difficult. I didn't like it because it hurt and no-one likes pain.
Years have gone by and I've come to realise that for learning or starting out, I'd be going with 10-11s to toughen my fingers up a bit as opposed to slicing them up with 9s.
Can't stress how important this is - you're not going to pick up a strat and bend like Gilmour on 9s anyhow. So, to me, it makes sense to build up from chords (easier to play with fatter strings).
People starting out want to be learning dexterity, punctuation (in playing a note from begining to end with no artefacts), and speed. These, in theory, should all be easier on fatter strings.
So I can mash my way through a bunch of songs, but have fuck all dexterity on the fiddly bits. Any tips from the pros in here, or video lessons you can recommend?
Mate, take my advice, use DADGAD starting out, and learn chord progressions on the DAD of the strings, while learning bits of lead, turnarounds and also chords on the GAD strings.
Status Quo is a good band to play to as they are probably one of the simplest mainstream bands to learn - they dropped their D's and when you get used to DADGAD, you'll begin to hear a lot of rock and roll songs.
Dexterity will come and this shouldn't be the main focus - the main focus should be learning the relation of notes and chords and how you build up sequences with bits of both. For example - Duelling Banjos is one of the best songs to learn starting out - learn it from beginning to end and make a point of learning it all... Dueling Banjos is like the roadmap to playing rhythm and lead at, more or less, the same time, which is the goal of any guitarist really.
From here, Blackbird is always a good song to learn (in standard tuning, but if you can play it in both, kudos) as it goes through most of the main notes across the board. It also helps with rhythm and timing, as well as sounding like a cracking song to play that everyone knows.
From here, it depends on which way you want to go, but personally, the basic rundowns of blues is a good place to go as the blues is the basis of mostly everything modern in song structure. If you can play the twelve-bar blues, you can already play about 30% of modern songs and that you think of.
The apex of any guitarist should be looking to learning the styles and songs of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton; there are a few others like David Gilmour, Stevie Ray Vaughn and B.B King... but you could go on for hours of the best guitarists to learn from... The ones I highlight are seen as the biggies... in that, if you recited one of their licks, most would be able to put their finger on it with little or no prompting.
There's one other thing that I feel is never really mentioned, but is probably one of the more important factors of learning guitar. That being, finger excercising!
Get a few rubber bands and go through routines with both hands of having the rubber band around all of your fingers and thumbs and stretching the band like a spider doing pressups. You can do this while watching TV and when you get into the habit of it, you'll understand why I say to do it... A lot of the time when playing the guitar, the two actions you're performing (on your fretting hand) is flexing and sretching. That is it mostly, different speeds and variations produce different sounds, but by-the-by, these are the two fundamental actions you need to physically train.
Using the rubber band method, you can build routines that replicate guitar playing and when you come to rehearse or practice, your fingers will be warmed up and over time, they'll get strong.
Other good exercises are like... if you think of a prawn or lobster... they have about ten digits that seem to continually move in sequence. It is kind of like Dracula's finger movements (Bela Lugosi) and that action, if you do this for a minute or two as fast as you can, this will help warm your fingers up to.
Forcibly flexing and bending your fingers, stretching them, pushing them against the palms of your other hand... Get into a routine that takes about ten minutes per day that you can perform like yoga.
On the guitar itself - if you're looking for warm-up there, a good way to start is to fret and note each string in every position, starting from the lowest to the highest. In sequence, every fret and note and try to get clear ryhtmic notes that are on-time and have good sustain.
Then go backwards.
Then I would have started learning triads of chords. A D E, C F G, D A G (so on and so forth) - the trick here is to learn the changes between those chords and you'll begin to notice well-known songs, and if you do, try to replicate them, or play along with them in your head.
But like anything, it is important to have a structure of learning, a habitable routine, goals and targets. It is better to play for one hour a day than it is to pick up and play for seven hours in one day - as long you keep this in mind, you'll not 'burn' your creative juices out with frustration.
