The guitar again

Today I received in the mail The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar, by David Hodge. I have been a little frustrated with trying to learn guitar, with finding songs I could play, and then choosing one of the seemingly dozens of different ways to play each chord. It is perhaps because I am well out there in the abstract thinking “type” that I felt like I was missing something important about the why of it all. I want to know the theory and ideas behind guitar, not just work out how to finger the next chord.

I have been quite surprised by how vastly different it is to learning a woodwind instrument, and the fact that I didn’t learn so much theory and wasn’t so familiar with chords certainly hasn’t helped. I can (or used to be able to) listen to a song and pick it out on the flute, but don’t seem to have any idea on knowing which are the best chords to choose to play on guitar. So, hopefully the idiot’s guide will enlighten me. I went for this book because I actually saw David Hodge’s name about in some of the things I did read on the internet. Now I just have to put the time in.