Hey all you fellow Old Folks' Beginners - Original poster here. I have now been playing guitar for 19 months; I still feel like a "beginner" though, at least as to acoustic rhythm guitar, if I can see the chords, I can "play" the song. For all the beginners that aren't "there" yet, you will be. But then you'll feel like "hmmm... that's not really enough." I turned 52 last week and my wife got me a new electric guitar for my Birthday. It is so BEYOND my skill set and experience, but it's awesome.

I've spent the morning reading posts that I hadn't seen and I miss the comraderie of this group of similarly-aged newbies to the "sport" of guitaring!

Despite the frustrations of metronomes and trying to follow rhythm and counting bars and following where I am in a song, or trying to get my fingers to go where they are suppose to go, I am amazed every week by the stuff that I didn't even know that I don't know. I can't tell if I'm a slow learner or a quick study, but I've stopped worrying about itand I am just enjoying the journey.

Anders Mouridsen once told me to pick one style after the Fundamentals and stick with that until I felt that I had it down well. I dabble a bit in pop rock and country, but I've been focused on the Blues. I am starting to understand what Anders meant, I can see that the skills - learning the music theory, the fretboard, scales, chords and all of the practice will eventually allow me to play whatever form of music I might like to play, but focusing on one genre gives some organization to skill development and practice. Thank Anders.

I have only recently started playing with the knobs and effects on my modeling amp, working with the differnt forms and amounts of delay, boost, reverb, phase, but I still haven't really gotten as far as I can with moving between the neck and bridge pickups and the single-coil vs. humbucker sound and, for that matter, moving the tone knob on my guitar to anything but "10". There should be a whole series for the settings on the electric guitar and then a separate series for all of the various amp effects and how to master that mix. geesh! I need more free time to play with this stuff.

Anyone out there in the same place right now and want to commiserate?