Help Me Focus

In this thread my goal is to gain insight, and develop what style ive created through expressing my frustrations and break through-s I've picked up on through my few years as a guitarist...please hang in there my train of thought may confuse even myself..


I spend most of my time practicing on my acoustic. The strings sizes and difficulty to play clear notes and there seems to be an over-all feeling I get from playing an acoustic compared to an electric.
From my experience it is very difficult to play without a pick and rely just on fingers to create music.
So I'm a bit of a finger picker and from this I think that I continue to increase my dexterity and finger strength in both hands. These thoughts influence me outside of just playing guitar but in my everyday life.
I've had to develop my own methods for training my finger strength and stamina. It's of course a lonely road but what road worth traveling would be an easy one..
I like to bar my first finger over the entire neck and then produce an E chord, C chord, D chord, G chord and work on my finger placement, through my left hand and then have my spare hand's thumb strum and 3 string pluck with exception to my small finger which kinda creates support for me to get really intense.
The chords I practice are what I would consider the standard way of playing them on 2nd and 3rd fret. but with my first finger baring all 6 strings.
(is this similar to anyone else?)

I was never taught a jazzy rift to practice on, and of course the first pentatonic scale i was shown was G major and just run up and down the same box never moving across the neck. This was just my opinion at the time when I was starting out..the rest of the neck kinda scared me is what I think happened. It still does in a sense.. from my point of view if you a guitarist does not have the speed to jump from root note to root note or have an intense speed there is no hope to making anything "cool" happen down there.
So to me playing within the first 6 or 7 frets was all I needed at the time.
I've continued to develop myself by breaking out of that box and play whatever random fret my hand would skip to and then play it vibrato to break the awkwardness of the sound/pitch/tone and develop an unfamiliar style.

Im realizing or begining to think that I lack the technical "know-how" to continue improving my skill in rhythm and solo work. Is there a reason why I can't seem to produce the same blues rifts or jazzy rifts as anyone else? is jazz something you just feel or is jazz something you don't get unless you are constantly playing it, living it, thinking it?

I just started tuning my strings out of standard tuning and dropped my low E string down a lot.
I can tune by ear to standard tuning so I've managed to get my strings to a good sound and playing with a messed up guitar has really added a lot to what little knowledge I have of a chaos theory for playing the guitar..
Could someone get me a picture /diagram/ of a fret board with all the notes labeled on it?
I thought I had it figured out once, to determine what note was where just by saying the alphabet, but F,F# G,G# and im honestly not aware of what other sharps there are on the guitar, i would think that all the notes had a sharp..its been a very long time since I've had formal training partners..


I've picked up on Slash's rendition of the God Father Theme Song,intro, and I enjoy using that style of combining two strings to produce that italian,or flamenco style to my own but of course to be different breaking it apart and skipping 8 frets or whatever just in hopes that something great could happen...

I like to think of the guitar as an instrument that has stood the test of time and has been the one to break apart different styles of music, its very important in our history as a world.
Similar to the guitar would be the piano,harp,violin.. stringed instruments right? Can someone tell me when guitars actually got onto the scene? I wonder just when the first guitar was thought up and how did it sound...

Repetition... this has bugged me... the idea of playing the same note more than 1 time.. is it possible to create a song with only 1 beat on a particular fret/note jump that note play 1 note different fret different string, skip again
of course there is sweep picking and just play everything, but that defeats the purpose of this idea of 1 beat per note.
Are there any musicians that have developed this style of playing?
Or would we say that its not common and people usually tend to play very basic music and keep within only a limited or standard amount of notes/chords...

if you could understand any of this thanks for your time.

Greetings

I've caught a few of the video lessions from ultimate guitar and decided I should check this site out.
So I hope that I am able to not only gain knowledge and experience from those of you who frequent this site but pass on what I have already learned from my own experiments.
I picked up a guitar when I was 9 and loved it. Upon entering high school I broke away from all stereotypical wannabes in the class and gave up my guitar playing for a good 5 years. Now I've been playing for a good solid year practicing all over again this has given me a great look on life enjoying this as a great hobby again. I'm looking to increase my scale speed allowing for potentially amazing solos. I listen to a lot of techno and many other genres of music (blues, rnb, soft rock, classic rock, classical guitar, metal) and from this my style of playing seems unique at least to me.lol
I'm looking to invent an old but new style of playing with very melodic beats.
Anyways I think as long as I can remain in the state of mind of wanting to be a student I will enjoy your company on the forums as well as viceversa.

-Johnathan