Should I just quit playing?

SagaciousKJB2 I know how you feel but, on Christmas of this year it will be my first year of playing guitar, and sometimes I feel the same way. All I know is about 9 songs and only 2 didn't come from guitarnoise.com. This songs I know seem boring to me, and they're times when I want to play like Eric Clapton, but I know my guitar goals are for enjoyment only, and I'm I slow learner. Being a bodybuilder, college student, working a job, and having a girlfriend, sometimes drives me insane!!!! :twisted: After I squeeze in a hour of guitar practice, I'm ready for bed.

Instead of putting the guitar down for a while, before you play next time, relax, tune the world out,and let the stress run free. This can keep your getting a burnout.Remember even if you want to play in coffee houses or just learning a couple of songs have fun. You can't learn it all at once. The months you take off from guitar can be used to get out of that hole. 8)

i also know what youre talking about, i ve been plaing for 2 years now and sometimes i feeel like im not making any progress at all, but a week later i amaze myself again.
i dont know about you, but with me its with ups and downs. and if you feel you should quit for a while then you do that, as long as you start again sooner or later :D

maybe something else that can help you out: http://www.guitar-pro.com
its a program that reads tabs you can find on http://www.mysongbook.com
its really small and it sounds great, ive made most progress due to this program...

greets

Well, really, right now it's a matter of having something inside my head that would sound very cool. You know how when you were kids (I'm assuming, 'cause it was always like this for me) you'd make up a riff or a solo in your head. I always have something like that going inside my head, but my skill level is just not anywhere near the level it needs to be to play it.

So, far, it really is mostly a matter of skill, as I revealed to myself yesterday. I downloaded a tabbing program of some sort, and I wrote a whole plethara of riffs and solos, and they were great sounding; really did surpass my expectations.

So, I don't know what the real problem is. I mean, in terms of my skill, I'm pretty sub-par to where I'd like to be, but some of the things I composed could fit into the skill I play at. However, for some reason, when I look at the neck of the guitar I don't know where to start.

Here's generally what happens when I try to make something up:

I start playing in a scale, and I'll just freestyle around a little bit, finding a pattern on it that will sound good. Then, out of the blue, I will hit another note and I say, "Hmm, that could sound good with something else," and it usually keeps going in that order until I have something that sounds relatively good, but that I'm continually stripping down and building upon. It's always, "It could sound a little bit cooler."

I think my other problem is that a lot of things I want to do, I don't know how. That is, in terms of sounds you can make, I don't know what techniques make those certain types of sounds.

As for what anyone else thinks of my guitar playing, I haven't really asked any guitarists. I've asked my close friend once or twice, but the answer he gave me was sort of iffy, so I didn't think he really thought too highly of it. I've jammed with my other guitarist who plays a little bit, and he seemed a bit neutral.

Sounds like you're putting alot of pressure on yourself. 10 months isn't much time. Even if we can cram all this guitar info into our brains, our fingers need some time time to learn how play all those riffs running around in our heads.

Playing with others and taking lessons especially will expose you to somebody who can show you the techniques and tricks you need to get the sounds you want. I've read somebody else's description of a pulloff dozens of times but could never really get it right until somebody actully showed me.

Good luck

All I think about when I read such things is that you have to allow yourself to suck before you can ever get good.

It's so easy to compare oneself to a professional recording or one of the greats at their zenith and feel desparately inadequate. However the deck is stacked against you.

Professional recordings use fancy equipment, effects, and all kinds of other "tricks" to clean up the sound. How could one ever reproduce that sitting in say a bedroom alone? How many bands or singers sound great on the radio or on an record but then sound like crap live?

Also, when comparing oneself to a master, perhaps it would be less depressing if we were able to compare their sound to ours, not after they have been playing professionally for years, but when they were only ten months in.

Everyone gets in a rut at times. Here's some things you can do to get out of it:

- Play a completely different style of music. If you do rock, play bluegrass. If you do folk, play some jazz. Stretch yourself in an entirely different direction for a while.

- If you read music, play something backwards. Literally - start from the last bar, and work in reverse. A lot of times boredom, and the feeling of making no progress, comes from repetition... playing the same notes from a completely different viewpoint clears the cobwebs.

- Play eighth notes in improvisation. Nothing but eighth notes, and no rests. Do at least five choruses. You'll find yourself reaching for different combinations of notes just to avoid killing yourself with boredom. Then take a break for a few minutes, and play the same progression again with total rhythmic freedom.

- If you usually use a pick, fingerpick for a while, and vice-versa.

- Work out the chord progressions to a song in an entirely different place on the neck. Then another place on the neck. Then try to connect some of your new chord fingerings (I'm not talking about switching from E form barre chords to A form barre chords here - try basing voicings on open D, C, or G chords, and try including open strings in high voicings)

- Get a CD with a solo you admire that's NOT played on guitar. It might be sax, trumpet, bass, whatever... come as close as you can to duplicating it on the guitar.

- Put a stopwatch in sight. Play for five minutes, then stop. Do that four times a day if you can, with at least an hour between sessions. Pretty soon one of those sessions will go well, and you'll be itching to play more... don't! Wait until the next session, then play your heart out until you're done.

- Try playing a solo on one note. You can bend it, slide into it, hammer into it (or pull-off into it), vary the rhythm, use a lot of silences, change the volume - and tone if you're on electric - and string attack. Squeeze as much as you can out of that one note. Next chorus, use two notes. Then it's free improv time.

- Listen to something really inspiring, and resolve that you'll get at least a few bars of it down.

- Reverse your picking. Try upstrokes on the beat, downstrokes between.

- Play a different instrument if you can. Figure out a riff you know on mandolin or banjo... the tuning's a little different, so it breaks the routine of specific fingerings.

Practice is sometimes boring, I know. I've spent tens of thousands of hours doing it, and in retrospect, hundreds or thousands of them seemed to make no progress at all. But keep at it - progress sneaks up on you when you're not looking.

Every once and a while I have to stop and just take a couple days or even longer off. In fact I think that is happeneing to me now, or I am recovering from it but Yes, I to as well as almost everyone here needs a break once and a while.

Good Luck!
Bstgutiarist
KB1LQC