Arpeggios driving me crazy...

What do you mean? What exactly is your problem with arpeggios?

I had this trouble when i first started too.  Try looking up 'Travis Fingerpicking' on t'internet.  This is a good place to start and gets the fingers working on simple arpeggios.  You can then go on and adapt it to your taste and style of music as you get quicker and more accurate with hitting the right strings with the right fingers.  Hope this helps?

Was that four hours per session or four hours between sessions?

Very simple little trick;

start with the pinky finger.

I think this is great advice. I've been playing only a few months and i am partial to a bit of fingerpicking. When working out a song I try to listen to the original recording as little as possible - just enough to get the chord structure - and I never play along. I'm learning my own version, not how to play the original. I just improvise an arpeggio over the basic chords.

(I also have to transpose virtually everything into the key of C or thereabouts because my singing is so poor and my vocal range so narrow.)

OK, nobody's going to mistake me for a professional musician, but so what? I'm a truck driver and I play for my own amusement. The main thing is to enjoy it. If you do that, then yo uwill practice more and your playing will improve QED. <img src="images/smiley_icons/icon_smile.gif" border=0 alt="Smile">

<table border="0" align="center" width="90%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SmallText"><b>Soupy1957 wrote on Wed, 22 November 2006 12&#58;10</b></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">
After fourty years on the guitar, I can say that Arpeggios are something that come outa your own heart.  Sounds too philosophical, I know, but the "book" will teach you ONE way, and your fingers will teach you another.

Being distinctively different is what gets attention.  Not being a carbon copy.

Don't worry so much about getting Arpeggios right "according to the book" (unless you are getting graded on them), but find your own pattern that fits YOU well, and develop the song(s) your doing, around YOUR style of play.

-Soupy1957
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<table border="0" align="center" width="90%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SmallText"><b>scawa wrote on Sat, 02 December 2006 15&#58;09</b></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">
dwvallance said:

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(I also have to transpose virtually everything into the key of C or thereabouts because my singing is so poor and my vocal range so narrow.)
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Man, a few months on the guitar and you are already transposing....  FANTASTIC. 

Have you though of getting a Capo?  Sometimes the chords you find with a song sound best with that "inversion"...  Then, you can use a Capo to get the song in a Key that you can sing in...

<font size="1">Boredom is a personal defect.

--Lamar Stephens</font>
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I do indeed have a Capo and i do use it but I also try to play most things in C open as well and see how it sounds best. The way I look at it, if I'm only able to sing in C I'd better learn C, G and F pretty damn good  <img src="images/smiley_icons/icon_confused.gif" border=0 alt="Confused"> One song that I always play with a Capo is wonderwall. I play it in C with the same shapes, which work really well for that song. This means my version is like james Blunt meets oasis, with the Capo on the 7th fret! Wierd but it sounds better than me trying to sing it in F# with the capo on 2 like everyone else (who can sing properly) does.

I guess I find transposition relatively easy because I have simultaneously learned the uke, which is 5 semitones above a guitar, so is like the top 4 strings with a capo on the 5th. You play a D shape on a uke and you get a G. play something that's in G with the same shapes on a uke and it's in C. That got through my thick skull and now I'm comfortable with the concept <img src="images/smiley_icons/icon_wink.gif" border=0 alt="Wink">