I tried to learn to play the guitar when I was young, but I used the
same method you are trying to use, and it didn't work very well.
Later in life I found another way to learn and that worked much better.
I can tell you how.
Put your favorite music on your stereo and play along, and make sure the
volume of your instrument is just as loud as the music.
Try all tones, play very fast so you have time to try many tones.
Fake it, pretend you know how to play, and push whatever keys you like.
You will hear that some tones sound false, others sound in harmony with
the music.
Play the same song over and over again, hundreds of times, and you will
soon learn what tones fit in and which don't.
Note the pattern of the tones that fit in, they form a scale.
Some tones fit in even better and more often than the others at each
moment in the song. They are the chord tones.
Start improvising along with the music, move from one chord tone to
another with the help of the scale tones, and sometimes a halftone fits
in too in a transition between two chords.
Soon you will feel secure enough to play along with that song without
having to think about scales and chords.
Then take another song and do the same with that.
That is the really useful way to learn to play, and you'll learn to
improvise as much as you like too.
The trick is in not being afraid of playing wrong, in fact, the more you
try to do wrong on purpose the more you learn about what tones fit in
and not.
And play fast, try many tones, that will both help you get fast fingers
and let you find the scales and chords you need to know by heart, not
learned from a book.
Turn the lights in the room down low, so you learn to play without
seeing what you are doing, that will help you one day when the lights go
out on stage and other musicians panic. It won't bother you, because you
learned to play in the dark.
Other musicians will panic when then have no sheet music or chords. You
don't care, you have learned to find out the chords and scales very fast
all by yourself and can do it in split seconds while you hear a new
song.
And for Gods sake, use headphones, don't torture your neighbors with all
the noise you are going to produce the first year.
You may need a mixer to mix the music and your instrument into the same
stereo sound picture. Most computer sound cards have such a mixer.
By the way, music is just noise with some structure, some rythm
structure and/or some harmonic structure.
Start by making pure noise, and add some structure here and there.
Don't be afraid of making noise and you will learn how to make music.
After you have learned to play in this way, read some books about chords
and scales, that will confirm a lot of what you have discovered by
yourself, and give you some new ideas too.
