Mike:
My advice for somebody starting and still struggling with the physical (ie putting your fingers at the right place and right time) basically reflects the "boring exercise" advice. Train up on exercises and learn songs the easy way using tab.
Once your technique is sound enough that you can play a few things no problem, I recommend IMMEDIATELY working on developing your ear. Learn things by ear as much as possible. This will help you improvise and develop your intuition for composing (which I assume you will want to do at some point
).
On some personal notes:
I play a KE3 as my main guitar. I have this modified to hell, stripped paint, active pickup, Floyd Rose monstrosity that I absolutely love. It's a basic soloist/strat shape. I took several sheets of sand paper to the body and then applied some sealer afterwards. Looks awesome, sounds great.
I'm kind of hankering for a really cheap strat though - upgrade the bridge and pickups and wail. Finally growing out of my shred-obsessed stage.
