It’s not much, but it’s mine!
I managed to get it clean, restrung and learned how to tune it. I’ve spent the last couple weeks just practicing the chromatic scale and just started learning some basic chords yesterday.
I started with the trumpet in high school and then went on to do digital music production as a hobby for ten years and even managed to produce my own album.
I realized a lot of the tracks on my album had guitar elements and it dawned on me that I could eventually work to make those my own actual recordings rather than synthesized.
So I’m already familiar with the slow burn process of learning a new instrument and I’m already seeing massive progress from the first time I picked it up. Here’s to the next decade of learning a new instrument!
It's boring, but if you're just learning, do a lot of fundamental work to build a good base. Work on making sure your hand position is good, fingers are set right, and string muting on open strings your aren't playing. The string muting is probably going to be more difficult early on, but it's good to at least be aware of it.
Practice scales to a metronome. You don't have to know the notes necessarily, but memorizing the shapes will be beneficial going forward. For me, it made learning new music more intuitive because you start to inherently understand how notes are connected so it's more organic when playing something new. If you want to start learning the notes, I'd say first get a grasp on the shapes, then when comfortable with that, start saying the notes out loud, even if it's slow. Eventually it'll start clicking and you'll start to recognize other patterns on the fret board like intervals.
When I first learned bass many years ago, I just learned songs and that's fun. Years later I went back and focused on fundamentals and even just a few weeks of that paid dividends going forward. I found I had to think a lot less because things were just more natural having been ingrained and everything got a lot cleaner once I was doing it properly.
But with all that said, that stuff is boring, so find some tunes and learn them. If you don't enjoy playing because you're just running scales, you won't keep playing, so pepper in some fun stuff.
This is exactly the type of stuff I plan on drilling for the first few months. There are a couple songs I want to try learning after a little while, but I’m not trying to jump into anything rhythmic yet. Just going very slowly and feeling for when the note starts to sound right.
I’m also making sure I have good form by checking the tuner occasionally for the individual strings. I’ve already trained myself to use a lot less pressure and I’m getting much better sound.
I plan on starting with things like hand drills, not so much focusing on music, but rather muscle memory. Once I can get used to the hand positions and feel of the strings, then I’ll start working with it from the mindset of music and start trying some riffs/songs I want to learn.
I’m looking at it almost as much as a tool as I am an instrument.
Bonus afterthought edit:
I also should mention that with my digital music production came the ear for what I want something to sound like. I’m way more focused on getting good form and a good audio capture than I am on getting my mental badge for playing a song poorly.