Originally Posted by: truck_2516[p]Basicallyi want to be a decent guitar player and knowledgeable enough with what I need to know to write music with my guitar without over doing theory.[/quote][p]
[quote=ChristopherSchlegel]The vast majority of songwriters learn by analyzing songs they love & the work of artists they admire.
If you completely learn & take apart a song you really love, then you will be able to see how it works, what makes it tick. What it took to put together & make it work. If you learn a few songs you don't like, then you can even learn what to avoid!
This is great advice by Chris. So many people think that they can forego learning songs by other artists because said person wants to focus on their 'original material'. When I've heard that stated in my years of playing, my internal voice was all like, 'oh, so you're too lazy to learn songs'.
You learn so much, as Chris noted, about what works and what doesn't work in original material. Just playing along with songs is very enlightening. You'll get moments of revelation just playing along where you realize that a certain chord change or key change works and even a little bit of why. You'll learn how a good artist builds songs and how to build emotion in to those songs simply because of certain musical choices the artist made.
It's funny, I've been a member of GT for a good long time but mostly now I use it to learn songs just to know them. I still challenge myself by learning songs by ear, which has never been as strong as I'd like, but once in a while (more often than that really), I'll pop in to the song list and go 'that will be a fun one to learn'.