Okay... So I've been playing for about five and a half months, and overall I've been pretty happy with my progress. I can play a lot of my favorite songs along with the recordings, barre chords are almost as easy as open chords and the transitions are usually pretty seamless, I've learned a few solos, and my grasp of theory seems to be getting better... But I'm starting to worry that I'm getting a little lazy in my approach, and it's going to stall my progress as I continue. I don't have particularly lofty ambitions with the guitar -- ideally I'd like to be able to play the kind of stuff I enjoy (Dylan, Bowie, Lou Reed, the Smiths, etc) and have enough grasp of theory to improv a bit and maybe write some simple songs (my childhood dream is to front a gimmicky punk band) -- and so my focus has mostly just been on learning songs and doing whatever else my teacher suggests (like scales and stuff to improve my picking/strumming/etc). I practice seven hours a week, which isn't a ton, but I'm very consistent about it and I usually break up my practice sessions into something like 20 minutes of scales/exercises, 25 minutes of working on new songs, and 15 minutes of playing whatever I want. But I'm starting to wonder -- is this varied enough? I've never had a particularly strong "ear", which was discouraging to me when I tried to learn instruments as a kid, and I think a big part of why I've had more success this time 'round is because I've been thinking of the stuff I'm doing more in terms of patterns and shapes -- so the "muscle memory" aspect is coming along at a good speed. I'm starting to think, however, that I'm just not focusing enough on associating the physical things I'm learning with the sounds. I usually put on a sitcom when I'm doing scales (because it makes 'em less boring), and this has to be sort of counter-productive, right? I thought it might be a good idea to play the scales over songs instead, but can you think of other things I can do to engage more with the music as I practice? I'm amazed at how much better my ear has gotten just from doing what I'm doing, but I still feel like I'm not giving its development as much attention as the "muscle memory" part, and I would imagine that as I get better, this discrepancy will be more and more obvious and annoying to me.
Hi there.
Firstly, I think seven hours a week practice is more than enough, it's an hour a day which, if well structured will give you good progress.
Anyway, I remember feeling the way you do now. With me, I felt I wasn't challenging myself because I had all the chords learned, so all I did was learn new strumming patterns to any song I fancied at the time, but that quickly became boring to me and I realized I was expanding my memory of chord progressions, but not improving my technique at all.
The next thing I did was to learn the pentatonic scales, and create my own little solos to songs. I also learned tab (although the general consensus I think is that learning to read music is ultimately better), this helped me play songs correctly as opposed to just strum along to them.
I found in only a short amount of time I didn't have to really just on strumming along to songs, it definitely wad "the next step" for me. Of course there are many steps after that, but this is what I did and it worked for me and kept me seeing progress.
"I like to play that guitar. I have to stare at it while I'm playing it because I'm not very good at playing it."
Noel Gallagher (who took the words right out of my mouth)
