With regard to walking across the fretboard and breaking out of patterns, here is what has worked for me. Go to a spot on the fretboard (string/fret cluster) that you usually avoid. In your case this might be all 6 strings between the 3rd and 7th frets, as well as all strings between the 9th and 12th frets. Whatever, anyhow, the point is to stay there and explore. Choose adjacent pairs of strings at the relevant fret position(s) and explore all the cool little riffs and tricks you can come up with at just that coordinate on the fretboard. This will take a while, but before too long you will have a bunch of cool stuff that bridges the gaps between the places where you play usually. Once you have enough of them, you can kind of reassemble their various parts "on the fly", and once you have done that, then you're there. With regard to guitar picks.Man, seriously, maybe you're ignoring the thing that is so close to you that it's too close for you to focus on. If you still can't find the right guitar pick after all this time, then try playing guitar without a pick. Like a lot of other things, this is a trade off. Fast alternate picking on a single string is hard to replicate, or even approximate, with fingerstyle playing (to say nothing of "chugga chugga" style riffs). But, and this is a huge "but", with fingerstyle you open up an absolutely vast array of options that are simply not there with pick-only approaches. Immediate cross-string pairs and more, like laying down ostinato bass lines and driving polyrhythms over the top. This is a different world of guitar playing to the pick-only world, but maybe it's yours and it's just waiting for you to turn up. Try playing with just your thumb for a while, then add your index finger every now and then when it's easy enough. Before too long you might be layering two or more parts together. Another obvious downside is that your picking hand fingers will hurt like little fuckers, but there is a tactility and immediacy to fingerstyle that more than compensates.With regard to strings.This is such a huge topic that it needs its own thread! What I have found rewarding is an attitude of fearless experimentation. There are a lot of different strings out there. Pure stainless steel, pure nickle, nickle-coated stainless steel, round-core, hex-core, rope-core, round-wound, flat-wound, silk-wrap between the core and the wind, nylon tape-wound, and many combinations of the above. Some of them are expensive, but worth a punt for curiosity's sake. This is not even taking into account difference in string-gauges. Fuck, just jump in!One final thing about guitars themselves (if I may).Different guitars do different things. For example, a strat and a Gibson ES125 are different instruments. Although you can treat them the same way, the outcome will be that you're going to be fighting. I've found that not fighting leads to the best results. Listen to, and \_feel\_ the guitar. Rub your hands up and down the strings and neck and get a feel for the geometry of the thing. There is almost always an approach to any given guitar that is an obvious path of least resistance. I've found that going with it is usually a rewarding exercise.

kerble wrote: Nowadays it's mostly electric fingerstyle, and I have almost completely eliminated using my treasure trove of guitar pedals. I find I really love the compositional creativity that kind of limitation forces. There's a great deal to be said for limitations in general! Imposing some limitation or other on oneself and sticking at it can do wonders. Sometimes I will pick on one string, as in I force myself to find something that sounds cool within the context of a riff or whatnot on one particular string. Other times it will be a particular position on the fretboard. Other times it will be within the context of a particular amount of time, as in I might have something cool going on, and I want to insert something \_into\_ it without changing the overall length of the riff/phrase or whatever. Little embellishments so to speak. One of the most rewarding limitations of all, for me, is that of rhythm. Going to new places rhythmically, like playing on the offbeat with syncopated timing or whatever, and then staying there whilst imposing all of the constraints mentioned above yields a lot. It's also maddeningly frustrating! But, we talk often about \_what\_ to play at the expense of talking about \_when\_ to play. Bringing a percussionist's level of pedantic obsession to timing on the guitar has opened up worlds to me. There are near infinite possibilities within a single chord. Guitars themselves are great constraints. I have some nice guitars for recording/performing, but my day-to-day guitar, "Thumpy", is a Chinese nylon string that I got around twenty years ago for five bucks. I put huge steel strings on it (had to hold the bridge down with epoxy). It is bent in half, has horrible intonation, and a neck the size of a telegraph pole. You have to fucking \_work\_ with Thumpy. You have to think hard about how to get things to hang together properly. Old crappy/wonderful guitars with huge necks and bad action and so on impose a certain finger discipline and knowledge of the guitar that is hard to get otherwise.

For picks, I think Tortex orange is the best. Tortex green if you play hard. If there's someone you know who's a really good guitar player in the traditional sense, see if they'll hang out and play a difficult chord progression and have you solo over it and give you pointers. My brother is a really good jazz guitar player and I've learned a ton just jamming with him.

eliya wrote: I'm thinking of trying those Jazz III picks. They're pretty thick, but small, so I might have more control with them.I really like the red Jazz IIIs not so much for their place on the thin/thick spectrum but because they have a pointier tip than the average Dunlop/Fender/whoever pick. I've been meaning to try filing some of the worn-down 2mm picks I have to a more acute point. But I'd be better off just buying a bag of Jazz III and spending the time playing.

I am currently in a band (not hifi) where I have to play conventional guitar, tuned standard. All of the songs were written before I joined the band and I am the side-man to someone who writes very conventional songs compared to every other band I have been in, I am WAY out of my comfort zone here.One thing I have been doing is if I think the song needs say a Keef Richards style guitar part I will go to youtube and plug in Play guitar like Keith Richards and some old guy will basically give me a lesson. I personally suck at playing covers and have no want to play covers, but I am a great rip off artist and snag a few ideas from each of these lessons. This has definitely pushed my guitar playing into some weird areas I would have never gone into.

I have almost no discipline at all when it comes to playing guitar, bass, bouzouki, mandola or whatever. I usually have no idea what key, chord or notes I'm playing. I don't know any boxes, scales or modes anymore. I sort of wish I did, but these days I just pick up the instrument and start playing it, trying to write stuff. I play bass with my fingers, maybe a pick for the occasional more-aggressive song. I like gold Herco picks.

Perhaps less than ten years ago or so I bought my first acoustic guitar. (I'll be 57 in a few weeks).It did change the way I play electric, and now I'm into fingerpicking and other geezer-music pursuits.27-year old me wouldn't recognize the bearded weirdo who's into folk-rock and heatheny music now.

I took lessons, in college I had jazz guitar lessons from a good guy, here in Mpls in the early 80s I wanted to get better so I had lessons from the guitar player from NNB, who was awesome. You need to hear NNB:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AWTGExPigI

In no particular order: Warm up. The muscles that drive your fingers are in your forearms and your palms. These muscles need to be relaxed and stretched and have plenty of blood circulating through them. The most important part of your warm up can be done while the instrument is still in the case. (I really wish someone had told me this twenty-five years ago.) Breaking out the old spider / walking-across-the-strings type stuff works SO much better after doing this first. Consciously develop a good posture with the instrument. A good posture is defined as whatever enables both your hands to be in a natural position with no significant degree of flexing at the wrists. This might mean you play with a strap standing or seated. I'm 34 and I'm short and I'm fat. I spent fifteen years hunched over my instrument because I hoped that way no-one would notice how short and fat I was. I finally don't care. Consequently, I play much better than I ever did before. What your body tells you about playing guitar is more important than what an article tells you. Listen to it. I have to adapt the literature's ideal positions to take account of the fact that I'm a fat short bastard, with the result I've found different positions that work best for a Stratocaster or for a 35 scale bass guitar. My jumbo acoustic, not so much, but even there I can do OK. My favourite set of strings for guitar is the Rotosound Grey 13-54 set with a wound third. (In my experience, these intonate quite well even if you want to tune down to C or B on a 24.75 scale guitar.) My favourite strings for bass is the Rotosound RB45 set for bass. Good attack, well-made, probably the best cheap bass string you can buy in the UK. I like the black Dunlop Jazz III picks and the Tortex yellow triangles, but I go back and forth. The most thorough and patient account of different picking techniques I've ever read is here and I recommend looking through it. You can get appreciably further with a 250 guitar and a 500 amplifier than the other way around. Time-feel is the internal clock that gives you a sense of tempo independent of anybody else. You need it to synchronise with other musicians. You also need it, in my indirect experience, to master producing any kind of complex rhythm. Mine is abysmal considering how long I've been playing. Practice scales, rhythms, melodies, EVERYTHING, with a click on the 2 & 4. Listen to music and feel the 2 & 4, drop your hand onto your thigh, your heel onto the ground. Then Comes Dudley sounds as incredible as it does because it's slower than a steamroller but all three of them are utterly locked-on to the time. Those musicians could play that song on banjo, gutbucket and washboard and it would still be a thing of primal terror. Same story with Sabbath, with the Who, Stevie Wonder, IMO. It's central. Again, you can practice this away from the instrument and it's probably the best idea to do so. There are five patterns (in standard tuning) based around the open-position shapes of the C, A, G, E, and D chords. Learning how these patterns overlap was crucial for me in being able to play melodies quite freely up and down the neck. (I think at one point I drew them all out in different colours. I also do this if I find a tuning I'd particularly like to play in for a while, such as that weird John Martyn one.) This means that when reading a chart I can find the root note of any given chord (and from there, the chord tones) without making any radical movement up or down the neck. Presently, time-feel is a much bigger challenge for me than knowing what notes I can play under an A º or a Cmaj7 + 9 or an Ebmin7b5 or whatever.

zom-zom wrote:Perhaps less than ten years ago or so I bought my first acoustic guitar. (I'll be 57 in a few weeks).It did change the way I play electric, and now I'm into fingerpicking and other geezer-music pursuits.27-year old me wouldn't recognize the bearded weirdo who's into folk-rock and heatheny music now.I agree. Knowing how to play acoustic is part of knowing how to play electric. Knowing how to play drums is part of that as well. There's no excuse for any guitar or bass player to not know how to play a decent backbeat.