Watch for him again. He posted "wasted four months" and whined about quitting. I tried to give him the cold slap approach.
You know:
You are defined by the choices you make. Quit you are a quitter, whine you are a whiner. Persevere and you are a guitarist.
Are you a quitter?
etc etc.
This of course failed miserably because mike wanted a pity party. So he asked me to delete his post.
That apparently happened while I was posting a reply, because it wouldn't let me post it.
Here's what I typed:
I doubt Mike got to be a good teacher in 4 months, either. I know I didn't.
I read an interview with Edward van Halen about the time I started playing. He was scoffing at guys who started to play because they thought it was going to be an easy route to picking up chicks and stuff, then got disillusioned. He said that most people fail to realize it's as hard as going to school to be a lawyer or something. EVH may not be the greatest role model, but that stuck with me.
I understand the difficulty and frustration, and it can be really tough to think that after several months of working hard you don't have much to show for it. But keep plugging away and it'll get better. It's not as easy for us grownups who have other jobs and family obligations to pick it up quickly like teenagers, but on the other hand we've got maturity and patience on our side if we set a goal we want to achieve.
In my case, I pretty much entirely switched to open tuning slide guitar after 6 months or so of painfully slow progress along the "standard" guitar path. It really caught my fancy, and has always seemed a great deal more sensible to me.
I still think I stink, but the night before last I was sitting around playing in a motel room, just banging around with abandon for my own amusement. I did that for a couple of hours and put it down. My wife went out just after I quit. She came back and said she'd run into "a young college looking guy" who asked "Was that guitar coming out of your room?" "Im afraid so," she said. "Was that you playing?" "No, that was my husband." "Wow, he's really good!" That's what she said he said, anyway. That was nice.
If you stick to it, Mike, I'll bet something like that will happen to you. Don't quit now.
:D
"A cheerful heart is good medicine."
That was a much better way of putting it.
Maybe I was just in a crappy mood today.
What it appears is there is to much thinking and not enough practicing. When I started out I didn't set around thinking about it I just played. I learned to take the bad with the good and just practice. Then again I had a different out look on things than most growing up today. Always looking for the good in everyone and everything. I'm always asked how did you make it sound this way or that, along with you make it look so easy.
The younger generation doesn't understand the true commitment. I didn't get to the level of playing I'm at by setting around and thinking about it. I got there by practicing long and hard, sure I take it to extreme's by playing for extended lenghts of time. What else in life is there?
Joe
