Guitar

[Comrade Landorus]

Yeah I don't know how to do prefaces.

I've been playing the guitar for like a couple weeks now. Its good times. So I guess I should ask you Smogoneers some things such as:

1. Do you play and/or interested in playing?
2. How'd you get into it and when?
3. What are your areas of interest in guitar playing? Are you a rhythm or lead? Electric or acoustic, maybe both? Preferred genres to play?
4. How and what do you play, and what are some neat tricks you've picked up on?

Personally, I got back into metal music a year ago, and while smoking legal tobacco, I noticed the guitars just sounded godlike in the mixture. I knew I wanted to be able to hit sweet licks. Through this desire to learn I expanded by ear for music, listening to all sorts of different kinds from classical to blues to country.

Currently I'm just playing on acoustic, and I'm trying to learn classical pieces for it. Fur Elise sounds beautiful. Due to this, and my bad habits for biting my nails and having really fat fingers I picked up a hybrid picking style using the plectrum and my spare fingers. As for tricks, I'm not too bad at hammering on and pulling off lol.

I also don't know how to do outros.

 

[Nix_Hex]

I've been playing bass since 2003 and play on the worship team at my church. Around the time that I started, I purchased a little Jackson Dinky for like $200, and mostly played along to Metallica and Pantera. I got pretty good at rhythm, and I think that comes from learning bass first. I stopped playing guitar around that time, and have only played bass since.

What kind of guitar do you have right now?

 

[Cresselia~~]

I used to play the bass guitar but that was more than a decade ago.
Used to be a good Christian and used to play bass guitar with gospel songs.
I don't do it anymore.

 

[Comrade Landorus]

I've been playing bass since 2003 and play on the worship team at my church. Around the time that I started, I purchased a little Jackson Dinky for like $200, and mostly played along to Metallica and Pantera. I got pretty good at rhythm, and I think that comes from learning bass first. I stopped playing guitar around that time, and have only played bass since.

What kind of guitar do you have right now?

Currently I'm just borrowing one from my stepdad but its a Simon and Patrick, not sure of the model. Its quite nice though.

 

[sam-testings]

i used to be pretty good at guitar hero

 

[BenTheDemon]

I also play Metal guitar. I started when I was 14, cause I had been writing songs lyrically for about a year and decided to learn an instrument.

 

[TheValkyries]

I was playing a buttload of Guitar Hero 2 and made a metalhead friend in freshman year of high school who told me about Iron Maiden. I listened to Aces High and p soon after wanted to buy a guitar.

Most of the time I either am practicing running scales as fast as I can or trying to remember random riffs that I've learned over the years. The neatest trick I've learned is how to sweep pick. My technique is disgustingly dirty tho so a lot of my time is spent practicing trying to be cleaner if I am playing.

A goal of mine would be to get better hand mobility on my fretting hand. I want to be able to move fluidly around the neck rather than just playing locked on a single scale shape in a single spot. Conceptually I get what I want but practically getting there is incredibly hard. It requires a lot of scale structure knowledge across the frets as well as a discerning ear for the tambre of notes depending on which string it's played on, neither of which I've ever developed very well. My best practice for this is then learning complex riffs and practicing those but it's not quite the same.

My favorite riffs tend to come from Folk Metal, Power Metal, or Melodic Death Metal.

 

[Bad Ass]

sup. I play guitar. It's one of my favorite activities. I keep a pretty even split between improvising over or playing to records I like, improvising on my own, learning new songs, and writing my own stuff. I have a pretty sweet collection of songs that I've recorded at low quality alone or with my friends. I much prefer electric guitar because it fits my style *much* better. I play different sounds, but overall it's a mixture of funky rhythms with blues/souls mixed in. some of my favorite guitar people/bands are duane allman, minutemen, commander cody, jerry garcia, isaac brock.

my favorite thing to do is blend lead and rhythm. I don't see why there has to be such a distinction between the two. nothing beats a guitarist with good rhythm mixing in a ton of (bent) double stops and fills in the rhythm.

I put my songs here for general showing to people, so have a few songs!
https://soundcloud.com/thomas_spader