The Insomniac Player

Since people keep asking for "the one thing I should know since I just started" I decided to put together a list of the most popular advice: Welcome to the group! (I originally wrote this for the Fender Play group on Facebook) Don't put the guitar way. Get a stand (~$15 at Amazon) or a wall hook (two for $11 at Amazon). Why? Because having the guitar out near will make it harder to avoid practice. Yes, this is a thing.  Muscle memory is a thing. It's not just memorizing the chords, you have to keep doing them over and over until the fingers fall in place on their own. This WILL take time, but it WILL happen. Your fingertips are going to hurt, there's no short cut. In 2-3 weeks you will still hurt, but your fingertips will be thicker. Stretching and warming up is important. You will find that your reach will increase after a few weeks of doing these stretches. Personally, I couldn't even do a full C chord, it took me weeks to be able to reach it. If you are ann...

The problem You are learning to play guitar with an acoustic, and you want an electric, but you just don't have a clue about which amp to get. And you don't want to make a costly mistake, you don't want to spend $300-$500 on an amp, only to find out that you don't like how it sounds and you may not get 50% back if you try to sell it. The Solution Postpone the purchase decision for the amp until you are a better player. And to keep you busy with your first electric guitar, get a headphone amp. For example, the VOX AC30 Amplug  which usually sells for under $40 USD. This will allow you to practice with your electric guitar with a nice, classic amp without breaking the bank. And for another $5 or so you can get a 3.5mm male/male cable and connect your PC, phone/etc. to its AUX port, so you can feed it music to play while you are playing. For example, you can feed it a backing track, or the audio from a video lesson. And you can take that same 3.5mm cable and plug i...

If you are having tune instability issues with your guitar, you may want to check out your tuners, especially if your guitar is in the < $200-300 MSRP range (if you are above that mark it is reasonable to believe that your tuners will be of slightly better quality). You can easily change your tuners to locking tuners, which have a locking wheel underneath. When you turn the wheel, the peg bites into the string and locks it into position. Because the string is locked, there's no need to wrap the string around the peg. Because there is no wrap, it is a lot harder to misjudge how much you are tightening the string, which means less chances of accidentally breaking the string. And because it is locked in place, there's no slip, so you will have better tune stability, you will still have to account for string stretching, humidity, etc. but at least your string length will be constant. A good quality set of these locking tuners will run around $50-60. You can go under $20 if y...

What is it? It's a digital audio interface for Mac and Windows. Basically an external sound card that allows you to feed a microphone and guitar/instrument into the computer at the same time. Each of the inputs has its own gain control with a color LED to warn you if the signal is too hot. The microphone input also has a switchable 48V power source. The headphones/monitor outputs can be used to listen to the sound as processed from the OS, or you can bypass all processing and listen to the signals as fed into the device. Setup Be prepared, this device ships with a gazillion licenses for two Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) and about a gazillion plugins and even your choice of one of four virtual pianos. It is almost overwhelming, the software bundled with this device probably costs twice as much as the box itself. My workstation is a Dell Windows 10 Enterprise workstation with Intel Xeon E3-1270 V2 @ 3.5GHz, 32GB of RAM, operating system and data are on separate physical ...

I was told to keep my guitar(s) out of the case and nearby so I always have an excuse for a quick practice session. These are now mounted just three feet away from my desk, the mounts can be found here for just $10. The kit includes two mounts plus three sets of drywall screws. The mounts can be adjusted for length, and they can be tilted for uneven heads (see the Telecaster). Installing them was dead simple, I actually spent more time measuring them than what it took to drill the holes and mount them.

Details  here .