by Tom Hess
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Making too much progress (too fast) in some musical areas at the expense of other skills makes your guitar playing unbalanced. I can’t tell you how many guitarists I’ve seen put all of their time into learning to play fast guitar licks, arpeggios and scales but lack the ability to make them sound ‘musical’ or self-expressive. This happens because your guitar speed and technique developed faster than your ability to think as fast as you can play and because the skills needed to ‘apply’ the speed in musical ways (such as phrasing, ear training and music theory knowledge, to name a few) were never mastered. The skills that develop disproportionately fast in relation to the rest of your guitar playing can never be applied fully, since your weaker areas hold back your ability to use them. This is similar to building a car and spending all your money on buying the best, most powerful engine, while ignoring the fact that the car has a bad steering, worn out breaks, horrible suspension and tires as bald as my head! You will obviously not get the optimum performance from your car’s awesome engine until/unless the other critical parts of your car are improved to make it possible (and safe) to drive the car at top speed.
By submitting your info, you agree to send it to Tom Hess Music Corporation who will process and use it according to their privacy policy.
Reason 1. Guitarists make an incorrect assumption that they must learn and master certain skills before beginning to practice other skills. Therefore, they intentionally put all of their practice time into those areas, tipping their guitar playing out of balance. I have seen this happen hundreds of times with new students who come to me for guitar lessons. Here are 2 extremely common examples of this:
Example 1. Guitarists focus all of their practice time on technique and music theory only, looking to master these skills before starting to apply them to creative areas of improvising and songwriting. These guitarists may develop their skills/knowledge with technique and music theory to a high level, but will still feel like (and be) total beginners when it comes to ‘using’ their skills to do anything creative (such as improvising rock guitar solos). Fact is, improvising has its own set of skills that must be practiced at the same time as you work on your general guitar playing. Few things are more frustrating than having to ‘start over’ after wasting an enormous amount of time developing your skills in an unbalanced way.
Example 2. A guitarist (whose goal is to learn to improvise) assumes that he must learn all notes on the fretboard ‘first’ before starting to improvise. He spends months memorizing the note names on all the frets and all strings as quickly as possible before attempting to practice improvisation. However he will be in for a shock when it comes time to improvise because not only will he feel like a total beginner with this skill, but the ability to recall note names on guitar ‘in isolation’ will be virtually useless UNLESS that skill is integrated with visualization of scale patterns and understanding of how notes function within chords. Once again, mismanaged and out of control progress has lead the guitarist in the wrong direction from his true long-term goals.
To see a more detailed explanation of why the above methods of learning guitar are incredibly damaging to your progress, watch this free video on how to practice guitar.
Reason 2. Some guitarists naturally progress faster in certain areas of guitar playing but not nearly fast enough in others. This happens because their practice methods in their weak areas are simply not effective enough to keep up with their musical strengths. This often happens with guitarists who are self-taught OR with guitarists who study under mediocre teachers who do not have a proven track record of helping thousands of guitarists to reach their goals.
Before I tell you what to do to prevent the problems above, here are 2 common mistakes to avoid:
1. Right now you may be thinking that the solution to the above problems is to practice all of your guitar playing skills for an equal amount of time. DO NOT DO THIS! Fact is, your musical skills do not all develop in the same way and at the same pace. So allocating the same/equal amount of time to all items that you practice will only ‘create’ the problems of unbalanced guitar playing I described above.
2. DO NOT think that you must practice ‘everything’ in order to ‘not have any weaknesses’ as a guitar player. You must understand that every single one of your favorite guitar players has huge, gaping weaknesses in areas that fall ‘outside’ the scope of their musical goals/style…however they are true masters of all skills that are directly and specifically related to what they want to do in music. Master progressive rock guitar players do not usually excel at playing country music. Jazz guitar players usually do not play neoclassical metal well. Heavy metal guitarists typically do not play fingerpicking at a high level. This is because they realize the difference between ‘relevant’ weaknesses (those that stand in the way of them playing guitar the way they want) and weaknesses ‘in general’ (that have nothing to do with what they want to do as musicians). ‘Relevant’ weaknesses MUST be overcome to reach your musical goals. ‘General’ weaknesses can be ignored.
Here are the steps to follow to ensure that you don’t suffer from the problems caused by unrestrained guitar playing progress:
Following the steps above will protect you from the all-too-common problems of mismanaged guitar playing progress and will help you to get on track towards reaching your guitar playing goals in the least amount of time possible.
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