Re-Beginning the Guitar

I recently received this email, but it’s one I get on a regular basis so I thought it might be worth sharing with you:

David:

Good evening. I picked up a copy of your book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar, recently and although I have only just begun to go through it I have a question or possibly a need for a recommendation.

At the age of twelve my father bought me my first guitar and insisted I learn to play. The next year or two brought lessons but, I must admit, not a tremendous effort on my part. Too many distractions like girls, cars, motorcycles, and the like. Next came a wife, three daughters, a successful career, and now at the age of 54 (semi-retired) I am finally interested in seriously learning how to play! I remember a lot of what I learned by I cannot say I ever really played well enough to call myself a guitarist. So I dusted off the Yamaha FG335II and purchased your book.

To get to the point do you have any particular advice for a re-beginner at my age? I still have the basics but I must say all else is rusty and my concern is at my age can I ever expect to be proficient with such a wonderful instrument?

Regards,

Thanks for writing and thank you, too, for picking up a copy of my book. I hope you enjoy it and I hope it helps you with your renewed study of the guitar.

As far as advice for “re-beginning” the guitar, oh yes, I’ve plenty! I must warn you, though, that you’ve probably heard a lot of it before. But that’s for a very good reason – much of the advice you get about playing the guitar holds true whether you’re just starting, just starting again or even have been playing for ages.

First off, you want to seriously think about why you want to play guitar, especially if you’re picking it up again. You don’t have to know all the answers right now, but you do owe it to yourself to think about the following questions:

Do you want to be able to play some songs and enjoy doing so?

Do you want to perform publicly?

Do you want to be as good as you can grow to be or do you want to be as good as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix or whomever you’ve chosen as your guitar idol?

That last question may seem to have an obvious answer, but you’d be surprised how many people actually lie to themselves about the answer. Somewhere inside they seriously expect that, in an incredibly short span of time and with far less of that spent practicing, they are going to sound just like their idols. And these people, not to mince words, are setting themselves up for nothing but disappointment.

Let’s do some math. Again, it’s nothing you’ve not heard before. But if you’re starting guitar at 54 and you’ve already have had let’s say two years of lessons then you’ve spent 50/52 of your life not playing guitar. That’s over 96% of your life. Just to compare, Eric Clapton is 65 and even though he got his first guitar at 13, he really didn’t get started playing until 15. So he’s spent 50/65 of his life close to 77% of his life playing the guitar. In order to get to the point where you’ve spent 77% of your life playing guitar, you’re going to have to play forty more years, give or take. And that’s also assuming that you’re going to be able to put in the same time and effort that Clapton has during his whole life so far.

Believe it or not, this sort of thinking is not meant to make you give up on playing. Far from it! It’s meant to give you some perspective as to what you’re going to be going up against so that you can hopefully enjoy every new skill you pick up, every note of every song you play.

You ask if you can ever expect to be proficient at your age. “Proficient” is an interesting choice of words. According to the dictionary, proficient means “having great facility (and an art, occupation, etc.); skilled.” If your goal is to become proficient then, yes, you certainly can become skilled at the guitar. Just how skilled, and how quickly, and (more importantly) just how happy you may be with your level of skill (and the time it took to acquire it) is all going to come down to you and your approach to both playing and practicing.

And let’s discuss practicing for a moment. Even though you may be semi-retired, with a wife and three daughters and a lifetime’s worth of friends and coworkers, not to mention all the little day to day stuff that’s going to have to be done by someone, you’re going to have days when you get in a good amount of practice and days where you’re not going to pick up the guitar at all. That’s to be expected. And you also have to expect that your progress is going to follow accordingly, particularly if you’re trying to play something that’s fairly involved.

This is all very normal for re-beginners. And essentially all the answers to whether or not you and your guitar have a lifetime of adventure and exploration and fun ahead of you are going to depend on your outlook and attitude toward playing. At the risk of making it seem rather simple and childlike, if you put making music first because you want to be a part of creating music, you’re likely to take delight in each musical step forward you make. If it’s all about you first, meaning that it’s about how good (or not) you are, then you’re likely to get frustrated and not be happy with your progress (not to mention your music) even if you managed to spend ten to twelve hours a day practicing.

My main reason for focusing on this is your own statement that you never played well enough to consider yourself a guitarist. Guitarists come at all skill levels. There are guitarists who’ve just picked up the instrument and who have a better sense of rhythm than those who’ve been playing quite a while. There are those who have been playing quite a while who’ve never played fingerstyle. There are those who can play Steve Vai solos note for note and who can’t name a single note they just played. There are those who can tell you all the notes of an E11(#9) but can’t play it on their instrument. There are those who can play along with over two thousand songs but whose lead guitar playing sounds like they have never put two notes together in the same key before in their lives. They’re all guitarists, like it or not.

As you’ve pointed out yourself, you still have the basics. Rusty or not, that means you’re still a guitarist. A re-beginning guitarist but a guitarist nonetheless.

For you to become the guitarist you’re capable of being, as opposed to the one you’ve imagined in your head, you’re going to be spending a lot of time exploring and practicing. You want to set yourself some reasonable, measurable and achievable goals to start. And I can’t emphasize each of those words enough. Be reasonable with yourself. Give yourself tasks that you can measure your progress. And give yourself goals you can reach. Success in small tasks gives you the confidence to take on harder ones. Being a beginner puts you in the best mindset for learning, no matter how long you’ve been playing guitar. Everything is new and fun and keeping that attitude helps you a lot when you run into snags.

Most important of all, you’re going to want to enjoy whatever guitarist you happen to become. Some days are going to be better than others. Some days aren’t. Every guitarist, every human being for that matter goes through this. Make a point of having a reason to play. Get together with others who play and jam and have a good time. There really is no better way to learn as well as to understand why we play instruments in the first place.

Welcome back to the club.

Peace