Guitar How-To

If you have been studying the guitar for one year and think that you are not as good as some of the people you see on YouTube who have been playing for the same length of time or some of your friends who are not nearly as smart as you are, is it time to give up? If other guys can play solos after a year and you can barely get through a song, where does that leave you?

Comparing yourself to other people is not a good idea. You don’t know how much more playing they do. Some people live at home with their parents and have everything done for them and they sit at home all day playing the guitar. A guy with work or study to do can’t compete with that. If you have reached the one year mark and are not happily with your guitar playing it is probably more to do with your level of expectations for yourself than other people being better at it than you.

So make your one year anniversary a time to take stock. Work on the technique that you are shaky at now. If you work more exclusively on one aspect of you playing that you are not happy with you might think that your other areas of guitar playing will stay the same or get worse. Wrong. You will find if you sharpen your focus on, say, strumming technique or bar chords, the rest of your playing will raise in quality as well. If you work hard on quality playing it will infiltrate into all the areas of your guitar work, and maybe even other aspects of your life.

Reinforce your decision to spend a set time in the day on guitar playing. Make sure you have enough stuff to fill the time. A good way of avoiding work is to not give yourself enough. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to everything in the time as long as you work honestly on the important stuff. If you up-and-down picking strokes are not as good as you would like them to be, then work on them till you improve. If you feel that you are “neglecting” learning chords or some other thing, go ahead and neglect for a while. Go back to your chords when you can see a noticeable improvement in you picking.

If you look back on your practice sessions in years to come, the ones you remember will be the ones that were focused.

Finally, if after a year you are not happy with your guitar playing, you should consider signing up for some lessons. If you have not had lessons before, a few weeks will be a shot in the arm and a few months will definitely change your life.

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