The first hurdle for beginners is the initial finger pain. The second is barre chords.
It’s just practice. Try and get used to using your forearm of the strumming/picking hand to press against the body to counteract the force of pressing the barre chord down. This is preferable to squeezing your hand super tight with your thumb on the rear of the neck - it means you are using your arm muscles to press the chord shape down more than just your hand muscles (which can be painful and difficult and causes cramps).
Yes it definitely helps low action can just mean a proper setup of your guitar. Then practice as said above will strengthen your muscles. You can also practice to press only when you play with your right hand. Many people discard the effect of muting with the left hand instead of trying to mute with the right one.
The force required to fret a note or chord successfully can depend on a lot of things. Thinner strings, lower string tension, lower action, shorter scale length (eg Gibson as opposed to Fender), flatter or rounder fretboard radius, and also technique (fretting right up against the wire rather than in the middle of the fret).
Yes, a lower action will help a ton. Seems like most electric guitars that come out of factories these days are set to low action by default. Get your index finger as close to the fret as possible when you barre. It’s a good habit to develop as this will bring out the best tone. A lot of beginner guitarists make their instruments sound worse than they actually are by not fretting properly with their fingers.
Huge improvement over when I first started to learn how to play guitar - it was on my roommate’s acoustic that he bought at a flea market for $30. Playing the F major chord next to the nut was so painful because of that guitar’s high action.
I trust you are familiar with bands who have guitars that sound nothing like guitars? Starting from Loveless by My Bloody Valentine?
I wish I could play guitar, I love the idea of it being such a hands on instrument when compared to synths. You’re actually physically manipulating metal and wood to produce the sound, which makes it a lot more expressive than just twisting a knob. Sadly I am merely a bass player, which I liken to a half-orc compared to the elvish guitar.
Love that album, as do a lot of other folks here I’m sure, but to me the guitars on that album still sound like guitars.
Keith Rowe is/was one of the pioneers at making a guitar not sound like a guitar.
Fennesz isn’t as extreme as Rowe, but still out there compared to typical guitarists. When I saw him live, I think he was running his guitar into Cycling 74 Max/MSP patches, which turned every little thing he did on the guitar into long sustaining clouds of ambient. This was from a more recent show in which he seems to have gone back to a bit more conventional playing, but there’s still a lot of heavy processing.
Learning guitar is a struggle. Don’t remember where, I read a Keith Richards’s interview in wich he said that to learn guitar you have to marry that damn piece of wood and metal and live with it as if was your wife: sleep with it, eat with it, love it and some time quarrel with it.
It’s the right metaphore IMO. You have to slowly train your body, passing trough a daily basis practicing. Every movement of the hands and of the whole body with the instrument, that in the beginning seems hard and unnatural, have to became natural and instinctual, to unleash your creativity.
To be honest, it’s the same with any traditional instrument.
Paganini said: if I don’t practice one day, I notice it only myself; if I don’t practice two days notices it also the audience.
These acoustasonics keep coming - adding a humbucker on this one seems like a nice choice. If I could only have one guitar, this one might be pretty high on the list. Good news is I can have a few
Either way, fun promo video that shows a lot of the possibility for different timbres.
Lower string action helps. I like mine crazy low but I don’t play with a pick very often so it’s easier to have super low action without buzzing.
A huge revelation I remember having about fretting technique was that you don’t need to push the strings all the way down to the wood, just to where the fret stops it. Not only does this let you use a much lighter touch (which is healthier long term for you tendons) but will enable you to play faster and more fluidly in the future should you decide to go that route. It feels weird at first but so does everything with a new instrument.
In the end it all just comes down to putting in the time.
A light touch helps a lot, also to play bass guitar. Sometimes it happens to press too much the strings: it doesen’t improve the performance and get tired the hand. To give dynamic at the execution it’s quite enough the hand that pluck the string. The hand that press strings on the frets have to save energy, to unleash it when it’s truly required, in bendings and hammer-on, for example.
Playing bass, I learned a trick to relax my left hand and arm: never play with the helbow too far from the body!
I was surprised a few years ago to see a post from one of my favorite guitarists - David Torn - in which he shared that he took some lessons from a friend who is a classical guitarist, and that friend suggested he keep his elbow closer to his body.
low action can just mean a proper setup of your guitar. Then practice as said above will strengthen your muscles. You can also practice to press only when you play with your right hand. Many people discard the effect of muting with the left hand instead of trying to mute with the right one.
