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Just be careful, it's really addictive.
As a new player myself I find it quite impossible to play Django tunes from pdf music scores. I barely have the skills to understand those scores, and when I try to play them the timing is all off and it definitely doesn't sound like music. Maybe if I had the funds to pay a teacher to study music reading for 5 years :)
I find youtube transcription videos a lot more useful. I wish there were more. Unfortunately even the few that exist are probably going to get sued out of existence once copyright lawyers discover them.
Learn the chords of the song. Don't get caught up in the dry vs not dry bs. Just learn the basic chords. Learn them well enough that you don't have to look at a chart. Forget about the upstroke.
Learn the head of a tune. It's sad when people don't know the tune but want to solo over it. You try to create melody when you solo. The head is a composed melody. Utilize that knowledge.
Don't get caught up in the bs rules of this pattern vs that pattern means you do x y or z. If you want to sound close to the sound, down stroke when you skip a string.
All the fancy substitutions are really great, but if you know your triads really really well, you will be very well positioned.
Take all of this stuff and go through one song at a time.
Get out and play. Take your lumps. Get beat up. Remember what you don't know and go learn it.
Have fun.
The Amazing slowdowner is a fantastic app if you want to learn Django solos (or any recording). Take your time, have patience. It will pay off. I have spent months on a specific tune, perhaps not getting it right in the beginning but slowly realising what notes are being played, the rhythm and phrasing and a suitable fingering.
Although I'm new to GJ, I have been playing jazz for many years, and have become OBSESSED with GJ. Apart from all the great advice everyone else has given, this is what I'm gonna add.
What I do is I listen to the players that I love. What I do is I have the harmony/chord progression running through my head, and I attack the tune based on this. I have learned ALL the arpeggios that I love, and will use in my library. In fact my style has changed because of this, but I won't go into that. I know what scales I will use, and I mix those scales with the arpeggios, and ornamentation. Now, and this has become "key" for me anyway, When I use a scale, and I wanna play and get the most milage out it, I have found that double playing, triple playing, etc, of certain notes, when phrasing, adds tremendously making great phrases, and running through the changes. It gives me the opportunity, to weave SO many lines and other spilt second scale runs into the mix, especially in GJ, and I feel its because of the " double down " technique, which I did naturally but never paid attention to it. I also pencil pick, but with GJ I'm always aware of sound projection. An example would be ascending on an E harmonic minor scale, I could do that, double play 1 or 2 notes, and then frame the next chords, target notes with an arpeggio, say 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and end on whatever note I wanted, complete with another scale run, ascending, or descending. or and arpeggio. I obviously cannot think about this while I play, remember I do this when running through progressions in slow motion, which is a form of practice for me.
I hoped this helped, as Robin Nolan says, "Stay inspired.,
To summarize a group lesson I took with Fapy I took not to long ago... you need good melody that is simple (at first) and beautiful and you need good rhythm that doesn't speed up or slow down. You need to learn songs rather than just heads (lots of these tunes are pop tunes from another era). Nailing the basics consistently is more important than going straight for the flashy stuff.
My personal opinion is that the genre should be learned as much as possible by ear. The sooner you are transcribing on a regular basis, the better. That said, Django is uniquely difficult to transcribe and make use of musically. It might be better to take the intro class, so to speak, and transcribe more recent players that play a classic style such as Tchavolo or Fapy. Obviously, this needs to be done with slow downer style software. Learning from tab takes longer and doesn't stick as well for a variety of reasons. All the greats learned this style by hearing and listening. We should too.
Also, apart from adopting the standard right hand approach required, don't be afraid of lots of downstrokes. Stochelo did only downstrokes as a young person. I find myself using more an more of them, especially on melodies. They make the melodies more consistent in tone and thus more beautiful as Fapy would recommend.
In terms of my personal experience, five things really accelerated my playing:
1) I bought a Cigano. Spending actual money (even budget gypsy guitars are expensive) was a great incentive to focusing on the style
2) I bought the Robin Nolan gig book. Expensive then and difficult to get hold of now - and if we're honest, not always that accurate (it's taken me years to unlearn some of the things I learned) - but in terms of getting you up and running with the core repertoire there's nothing else like it. Although not in print, it's not that hard to find as a pdf. (Later, I bought Michael's Django Unaccompanied which took me to the next level, a treasury of Django licks and you don't need another player or backing tracks. Waltzes are also a great shortcut to lots of ideas and licks).
3) I jammed as much as possible - if you can't find other players you may need someone else to learn with. Playing with people who are better than you are is the best way to learn quickly. This is also where the Nolan gig book comes into its own.
4) In terms of arpeggios, I spent a lot of time just playing notes from the chord, visualising the chord as I played. I know that sounds too easy but that is literally what an arpeggio is. Then I added notes above and below the chord tones. Then I realised that, using those notes, I could connect chords using the CAGED system. The E - D shape of that system is particularly useful. By connecting arpeggios, you can go up the neck really quickly. You'd be surprised how fundamental this is to the genre, and how liberating it is.
5) Finally, playing along with records was really valuable, whether solos or rhythm. Gypsy jazz actually encompasses a lot of different styles, so don't pay too much attention to 'the rules' and just play along with Django, Joseph and all the others, and try and get the feel, the groove and the timing right. And enjoy it!
EDIT - I forgot to add, I spent a lot of time focusing on ornaments, how to pick them, when to use them, as that is really fundamental to the style but not always flagged when people talk about it. One experienced player confessed to me once that sometimes they just made sure they put a lot of vibrato on the last note of a run, because almost any lick will sound right if you shake the hell out of the last note!
Stu can you elaborate on #4? Thanks
Sure = it's nothing special, I probably wasn't explaining it very well. I take it you know the CAGED system (for anyone who doesn't, it's a way of visualising chords up the neck based on the cowboy chords we all learn in the open position when starting out). So, for example, for a G chord the 'E' shape is at the third position, the 'D' shape is at the fifth, the 'C' shape is at the seventh, the A shape is at the 10th fret and the G shape is at the 12th. By looking for notes and positions which connect those shapes, it's very easy to go up and down the neck from 3rd position to the G on the 15th fret very quickly.
It's not complicated but a major revelation to me when I was starting out!
More to this, if you focus on the top 3 strings, you really have 3 shapes for major and 3 shapes for minor chords. One shape is formed by root-3rd-5th, one is the first inversion (3-5-1) and then second inversion (5-1-3) for each major and minor chord (b3 replaces 3). Then you can fill in the other notes surrounding those shapes.