guitar questions

Hi,

I've been playing piano for some years, and I'm thinking about taking
up the guitar. I have a few questions I'd like to ask about how the
guitar is played.

With the piano, it's like a mini-orchtestra, in an arrangement you can
balance a lot of different things all at once: bass, chords, melody.
I think maybe too many different things to juggle, and it can take the
fun out of it. I know that when playing accompaniment, it is usually
done with the right hand playing the chord patterns, and the left hand
playing bass patterns, and anything less is considered "inadequate" and
frowned upon.

my question about the guitar is, when you play accompaniment from a
fake book or charts, do you have to juggle bass and chords patterns
together on your guitar (like we do on piano), or is that even
possible? I'm thinking that with playing an acoustic guitar, you'd
just play the chord patterns only and sing along.

Also, what if you were to play a guitar solo...is it possible that you
can play both straight chords and the melody all at the same time? Can
all of this be juggled on the guitar simultaneously? I know it can be
on piano. I know that a lot of guitar bands have someone who plays
rhythm, and another who plays the lead lines, so I'm thinking that it's
not very common for someone to play both things at the same time on
just one guitar.

I'm thinking about shifting away from piano to guitar because I'm just
looking for a more straight forward instrument where I'm not expected
to juggle a bunch of things at once in order to sound "adequate" or
"professional". Also, because of timbre, the guitar sounds like a
much better instrument of accompaniment than piano for rock songs, like
what I enjoy playing.

thanks

.

Relevant Pages

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