There’s a lot of busyness in the world today. Ask someone how they’re doing and you’re likely to hear about how busy they are, how busy they’ve been, how much they’re looking forward to the upcoming calm.
Owning a business is a busy profession. When you’re the one on the line for everything, taking time for anything that isn’t the business, that isn’t about profit… it’s difficult. I run a marketing firm and we’ve certainly been busy.
Despite this, I’ve managed to enjoy a healthy amount of time with my guitar this year. I’ve improved (mostly because I started from near zero in January, having gone 10+ years without playing) and really loved the hobby. I wanted to share some insight on how I did it, and make suggestions for ways you can improve as a player.
The first and most essential thing you need to do is to set a goal for yourself. It should be measurable and have some kind of timeline. A lot of people reject this idea because they view guitar as a hobby. If you view it purely as a hobby, you will never grow past the skills of a hobbyist.
None of the people whose talents and proficiencies you admire play their guitar as a hobby. Maybe you’ve got a friend that makes it look easy, but I promise you that he or she put in the hours somewhere.
So it starts with setting a goal. You don’t have to set something that ruins the fun of guitar. Setting a goal of learning to play 5 scales at 160 bpm is probably gonna sap your joy really quick. Maybe you’d just like to learn one song in particular. Or to grow a repertoire of 50 riffs. Those are measurable goals and they give you something to focus on. For me, I bought a nice guitar and sat it aside until I’d learned 100 riffs. I’m coming up on riff 90 and so excited to finally be able to play the guitar I’ve been waiting for. It helped me find the right balance between improving my overall play and getting a nice little list of songs built up.
My favorite suggestion to give to people is about creating a list of everything you know. Keep this list somewhere safe and backed up by cloud storage, because you’re going to start to really value it as it gets bigger. Going through and confirming that I can still play all of the songs on my list is something I try to do every few weeks, and it helps me to find songs that I either want to expand on or artists I might want to follow up on learning. I created theme months during my year, like Iron MAYden and Zeptember, where I’d focus on individual artists. Coming up next year is Ganuary, where I’ll be focusing on Open G tuning and all of the Stones riffs I’ve always wanted to learn but never wanted to turn to. Having this list means I can track what I’m doing, and having the themes really helped fill the list and helped me to understand styles and techniques of individual artists.
The next step is carving out the time. Nobody loves hearing it, but we waste a lot of guitar hours on our phones. Whether it’s YouTube, Reverb, forums, or Facebook groups. There’s certainly something to be said for being a part of the community, but for argument’s sake, try and measure all the time you engage with guitar related activities that aren’t… guitar playing. If you’re concerned about counting that time, consider that it might be too much. This community is generally a lovely place, and time enjoyed here is well spent. But at the end of the day, you’ll always be giving likes rather than getting them if you don’t have a healthy balance with practice.
That’s it. There are a number of amazing technical guides on this site and if that’s the piece you’re looking for, please read those. I hope that realigning your thinking here to be more goal focused and practical will avoid the boring issues of repetitive practice while helping you get the benefits of improving at guitar. It’s a constant journey, and nobody stops. But these tips should help your journey go smoothly!
More guitar articles @ The Blogging Musician.
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