Guitar help?

[Gen]

hey all. My dad bought me a (used)Johnson electric guitar and amp. I have almost no clue what I'm doing ^^; I have learned two basic chords and how to properly hold it, strum, etc. Would anybody have advice? If it matters, I want to play hard rock or alternative and not crazy metal. Thanks in advance.

[Tyla]

Perfect fifths - otherwise known as power chords are pretty universal as far as music goes. Essentially, they look like this, if you can read tableture:

e-----
B-----
G---7
D---5
A-7--
E-5--

For a sloppy sorta thing anyway.

And then there's also the barre chord:

e-5
B-5
G-6
D-7
A-7
E-5

A Major essentially - a few changes in the fingering and you'll get a different type of chord. Moving the 6 on the G string down to a 5 will make the chord minor, moving the D to a 5 makes it a 7th chord...

I'd kinda recommend that you look around Youtube though, and I highly recommend checking out Lypurs' videos on Music Theory - they helped me a lot on my theory, not necessarily for guitar, but it generally boosts your knowledge of the workarounds of why some pieces of music sound like that - Lypurs' lessons start from absolute beginner, link to his channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Lypur

There are probably a lot of other sources that work for practical playing of the guitar on YouTube aswell, as well as textual sources. I also highly, -highly- recommend you take a peek at www.circle-of-fifths.net, which is a fairly interactive website for learning a pretty important part of music theory.

[Archangel626]

If you want to learn a song already made, start of slow and after playing it down speed slowly increase the tempo up into the regular tempo...

Another thing which im still learning is when your doing pull offs you have to learn to strum with your finger that your pulling off from (that might not make since but thats the only way i can only explain it)

Its a good thing to learn different styles of picking for different song styles... You can use a pick for alot of songs but when you want maybe play a song like Blackbird by the Beatles thats preatty much impossible... You would need to learn finger picking (which bass guitar could help in)

Otherwise start off slow, and don't get frustrated if you cant get something right away... It has taken me almost 2 months to learn how to play Asylum of Glass by Buckethead and I still can't play the whole song up tempo... im really close thoguh