Re-Beginning the Guitar (Part 2) – Enjoying the Ride

David Hodge Guitar Lessons Tips on Learning to Play Guitar

There are all sorts of reasons to take up guitar. Likewise there are all sorts of reasons to put it down. For most people, the big reasons for giving up are either frustration or disappointment.

Both frustration and disappointment are easy to understand. And, as they often tend to feed off one another they are often hand in hand as reasons. You try to form a chord and it’s hard and doesn’t sound clean and then after a lot of work you finally manage to get it right. But then the very next time you go to play the same chord it sounds terrible again. Well, who wouldn’t be disappointed or frustrated?

Worse, you have a friend who plays or took up the guitar the same time you did and he or she seems to be moving ahead in leaps and bounds – making chords cleanly and changes between them smoothly, strums nicely and evenly and (worse still) actually sounds musical. So you think that the guitar isn’t your friend and you start to wonder why you’re even trying to learn to play it (again) when it’s obvious that you’re not getting anywhere.

Whether you know it or not, whether you admit it or not, your mindset is going to be the biggest reason why you do well learning – first, second, third or three hundred and sixteenth time around. It’s easy to say to yourself the right things like “I know this will take time” or “I need to be more patient” or “I’m not in any hurry” or even “I’m not trying to be the next Hendrix,” but it’s another to understand what you’re saying enough to truly mean it.

For instance, take this email I’ve gotten recently from someone who is planning on getting a copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar (and thank you for that, by the way):

Approximately how long will it take for me to learn everything in the book if I practice, say, two hours a day? I’ve learned the absolute basics, i.e. the “normal” voicings of all the major and minor chords and some of the dominant seventh chords, and some of the stuff you covered in your podcast. I’m not impatient, but I’d like to know how fast I’ll be likely to progress so that I can set the right goalposts and stay motivated.

On the surface, this is a straightforward question and one would think that there’s a direct, straightforward answer. But instead let me ask you this, “What, exactly, do you mean by learn everything in the book?”

And let me give you this example that I first heard from Nick Torres, our Moderator of Moderators over on the Guitar Noise Forum. Suppose I gave you a book called “How to Swim” and suppose that you diligently read it from cover to cover several times, enough to quote significant passages and to pass several written tests about this book with 100% accuracy. Would you actually know how to swim?

Or to put it another way, would you give someone a driver’s license without putting he or she through a driving test. Not just the written test, but actually driving as well?

Book learning, or audio learning or video learning or DVD learning for that matter, only goes so far. Part of your learning process, the biggest part of it when it comes to playing a musical instrument, has to be the hands-on playing. Practicing has to come into play in order to learn how to play. And if you can practice two hours a day, then you are on your way to making some serious progress.

But, that’s assuming that your two hours of practice is giving you the best chance of learning in a practical manner. Simply switching chords is great practice for changing chords, and if you do just that for two hours, you’ll definitely get better at it. But if you’re not practicing changing chords in rhythm then you might find that even though you’re changing chords well you’re still not making the changes in time for them to sound musical.

Likewise you can practice your strumming for ages but unless you add chord changes to that routine, you’re going to find that you can only do part of your task as a guitarist optimally. And even though you may be great at part of what you’re learning, the chances are that you’re going to be frustrated or disappointed because your guitar playing is not measuring up when it comes to the big picture of a complete guitarist.

Understand that when you are learning the guitar, or any musical instrument, that you have a whole menu of items to learn. There’s obviously the mechanics of the instrument, and the guitar isn’t like a piano where you press a key and presto (!), there’s your note. You’re constantly going to be learning and adjusting how you hold your guitar and how you make chords, not to begin to mention how you’re going to go about changing from one chord to the next. Then there’s learning about music (notes, harmony and rhythm) and about how those elements of music relate directly to the guitar. There are a lot of things going on and each aspect of learning has multiple levels to deal with.

Again, this isn’t to put you off. It’s to give you some perspective. Believe it or not, a lot of what you learn you may not even realize that you’ve learned until it just hits you one day. Despite the posturing that most guitarist will make about not needing to know anything about music in order to play (like reading notes or learning basic music theory), good guitarists do actually know quite a bit about music. They just don’t always know what it is exactly that they know. Worse, they don’t know how to call up that information when they need it to make their playing better.

The best thing that you can do for yourself when you’re starting out to begin the guitar (or re-begin if that’s the case) is to keep in mind that you are not taking part in a project that can be done linearly. There are going to be a lot of loops and cycles and revisiting and restarts in your journey. Put yourself in a mindset that, wherever you go and wherever you may find yourself, you’re going to both enjoy it and make the most of it.

While it’s easy to be overwhelmed by thinking of all that you do have to learn, it’s also easy to break your tasks down into manageable pieces that you can handle. If you’re starting from scratch, you should focus your attention on these major areas:

Chords – Learning chords is far and away one of the two most important things you need to do as a guitarist. Even if you don’t ever intend to play chords, knowing how they are formed and where to play them on the neck will make almost every other aspect of the guitar easier to do in the long run. Initially, your primary concern is going to be on simply forming them correctly (and there’ll be more on this in Part 3 of this series) but you also want to memorize them as quickly as possible so as to free yourself from having to constantly look at charts. And then there’s switching from one chord to the next! Again, we’ll be discussing this in the upcoming Part 3.
Rhythm – Developing a sense of rhythm, how to strum and how to steadily keep a beat is the second of the two “most important things.” This isn’t an “either / or” choice and you don’t want to think of one as more important than the other. You have to have both.
Setting Goals – Right from the start you have to give yourself some achievable targets. Make them reasonably easy to start with, like memorizing three chords in a week, so that you can build some confidence from attaining your early goals. Knowing that you have reached some of your objectives will also keep your frustration levels low, assuming you’re objective enough to remember that you’ve achieved them!
Reason – Silly as it sounds, you have to give yourself a good reason to play. Learning a specific song or playing with others will give you a big picture from which your day to day goals can be drawn.
Play Songs – From the start you want to play songs you know. They don’t have to be ones you like, although you’ll probably be surprised to find that you may like songs you don’t normally listen to simply because you can play them! Songs ultimately bring all the aspects of music you’re learning into one place. You’ll need your chords and rhythm skills and then you will get the added pleasure of creating your own arrangements of songs, if for no other reason than most of them are going to be very difficult to play exactly as they were originally recorded.

Playing guitar and making music is a wonderful, beautiful experience. But it’s also supposed to be fun. Take pleasure in learning and don’t think of it as a chore but rather as a big part of creating music. If you look forward to learning, even when it often means coming back to places you’ve already been, then you’ll look forward to practicing. And when you look forward to practicing, you’ll make time for it out of your already busy day. And a little every day is the start to having a lifetime of making and sharing music.

Until our next lesson…

Peace