Fool-Proof Songs

I once learned the opening bits to "Knowing Me, Knowing You", "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" and "Enter Sandman"...They all taught me, that guitar playing can be quite simple...

If you can read tab, you can learn anything really.

the way my music teachers made me sing "do re me mi fi fa so le la te ti do" every day at school in numerous orders was the only thing that made me learn about scales ever (and I still screwed up on the sight- singing part of my exam, bah). But I am proud of myself for picking out the notes to the Wayfaring Stranger song (g g d d bflat c d c bflat, etc.) and go "do do so so blah blah blah" and soon I will make chords to go with it and then I will tell you because by that point I will have learned something.

and i messed up anyway it's mi fa fi not mi fi fa grrr (that being all i learned all semester i MUST get it right)

Any song by Hank Williams Sr. will clue you in to country and the blues (= rock). "Cheatin Heart" "Half as Much" and "Mind Your Own Business" are good.

I taught myself how to play guitar... which doesn't really mean I can play still... but one of the first songs I learned was (ahem) Guided By Voices's "I Am A Scientist". Yeah yeah, I know. But in standard tuning, it's quite easy... just poke around notes and you'll eventually find them and the chords with it.

Surfer Girl is easy and it has the bonus of using a major and minor G chord. Or is that In My Room? Also, the VU's Afterhours is a quickly mastered tune as well. All can be done while quite drunk.

Steely Dan, "Glamour Profession"

If I remember the mp3s correctly, you can play competently, right? And are now looking more for theoretical advances as opposed to "how to play" advances?

Because nothing taught me more about the mechanics of guitar than learning fake versions of bossa nova songs -- buy a copy of Joao voz e violao, look up some proper tab for it, and then retrofit to your skills. The conversion will teach loads, plus afterward you'll have the ability to play and sing wispy bossa tunes in Portuguese, which will allow you to impress GURLS. Not that my superb rendition of "Nao vo pra casa" has accomplished this yet, but in theory it could.

This advice hinges on the assumption that you wouldn't be up for an all-out learnings of bossa and jazz guitar, which I think is a safe assumption.

Anything off Galaxie 500's "One Fire" is extremely easy to play. It's virtually all standard-tuning open chords, and often the same darn ones.

N., you shame me with your praise. I guess I can play "competently" (I know a buncha chords & all, and can switch from them well enough), but damn if I don't know what the hell do to with them all. I'm not sure if this "understanding" I lust after is something you learn, or something you simply pick up. The fact that I'm trying to figure out the logistics behind acquiring this "understanding" obviously means I'm going aboot this the wrong way.

The best method, I guess, is to continue slogging away, trying anything & everything, crap & suckage be damned. Constantly risking absurdity, as it were.

Ah.. I misunderstood. Best way = trial and error. I've come up with many a clever and interesting chord change that way.

As far as enlightening me on music theory-type stuff goes: "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman." It's in a lot of Hal Leonard-type books, and has weird but easy chords that fit together beautifully.

In a very different vein: check out the Stephin Merritt tab archive at stephinsongs.wiw.org--all very easy but very interesting.

My personal Everest for guitar is Robert Wyatt's "Sea Song," with which I've been tinkering for almost 3 years.