First, ATTENTION GOOGLE: if I enter the name of a product along with the keyword "review", surely it stands to reason that I want to read reviews. Not price comparison websites. You cocks. This isn't exactly rocket science.

Searching for guitar instruction material is almost as bad as looking for pr0n. I mean, almost as bad as what third parties tell me it's like to look for pr0n. The Internet seems rife with "pay $19.95 and be a guitar god within the hour" material. What's up with that?

My guitar does sound quite nice actually. Well it does to me, I suppose I'm clueless about the sound.

Now then. Chords. Well I can do a few chords but I am not happy with it. You guitarists. Go and play a G chord. Ok. So it's a G chord. What inversion? Which string do you fumble around with to arrive at, say, G aug? I can play a chord and not know exactly what I'm doing. This does not make me happy. I suppose I have been at the piano for too long.

Or how about this. There I am, picking out a melody on the first two strings. Now I want to shove a chord, with a specific voicing, under the melody. HOW?? Right now I'm resorting to trying out all the strings and all the frets within the span of my hand until I somehow arrive at some notes. Surely there must be a better way. But it seems that most guitarists don't give a damn about this kind of thing.

When I started out playing leadsheets on the piano I used to play root-position triads in my left hand. Ok. But nowadays, when I read the chord symbol, I construct the chord from scratch, first considering where the melody is, choosing the register of the bass note and playing it with the 4th or 5th finger (oh yeah, and why are guitar fingers numbered differently than piano fingers?), deciding which chord tones I should put in the other fingers of my left hand, then distributing the rest of the harmony among the spare (non-melody-playing) fingers of the right hand, adding 6ths and 9ths or other alterations to taste, perhaps adding an arpeggio, walking bass, stride or other flourish, and all without too much thought. Then I do it again, even if the chord hasn't changed in the mean time.

Guitar? Not a chance. Ok, perhaps in few years time. But reading some forum posts by people who have been playing the guitar for eons, it doesn't seem likely. Some guy who's been playing 5 years encounters an A minor, and does exactly what I do with one week under my belt. At least, that's how it seems to me.

The other thing is that I'm left handed, but I play the guitar like a right-handed person. It feels more natural this way, and all the weird chord acrobatics are in my dominant hand. I wonder if I'll hit a wall in the future? I really think the left hand has a tougher job to do. Am I mistaken?

Fun fact: I play the bongos in the right-handed way, too.