Recovering from not playing for awhile

[diffra]

Hi all,

I've been playing about 10 years, but recently had to stop for about 6 months because we had to move to help out some family and i left my guitars behind. Picking it back up again, I know i'm going to be rusty(plus, I hadn't really had time to sit down and actually practice for a good year before that) -- where would you guys recommend I start? While I understand theory fairly well (6 years of jazz sax), I've never gotten much past box patterns as far as scales go. Any dvd's or websites or books you'd recommend picking up? I've got a 7 month old, but I can devote about a half hour to 45 minutes a day to guitar. Thanks for any tips/pointers.

[Katastrophe]

I would start by just learning some songs that you like. With your theory, you should be able to figure out the key of the tune. For further study, go someplace like here: http://jguitar.com/scale . You can then find scales that work within that key. Experiment! This should be fun.

Hope this helps.:rockon:

[thearabianmage]

Blues. If you have a grounding in jazz you will have no problem with Blues, and although you can start with patterns and positions as far as the soloing is concerned, you should quickly be able to progress beyond that into playing all over the neck.

There are also a few different chords you can learn depending on what style of blues you want to do. They are not always dom chords - even though blues is generally associated with dom chords.

There are plenty of old threads here at TheFret that should give you nice start, so you won't have to go rootin' 'round the old internet too much.