by Christopher Ingram
Do you feel overwhelmed with the lessons you are given, the music books that you are trying to figure out, learning new skills, and the proper techniques to use while you practice? This is very common when learning to play a guitar (or any instrument for that matter). This can even occur with advanced students who are pushing themselves to learn some new technique or music. These feeling can be paralyzing and is very dangerous for you as you strive to progress. Do not push these feeling aside – deal with them. If you are feeling frustrated you need to re-evaluate your practice methods.
Learning the specifics of guitar playing in difficult, and one of the things that makes it so challenging is that you are the only person who can put the specifics of learning the guitar into place, stick with them, review and revise them on a regular basis, and set goals to make sure they are accomplished. Some people will feel overwhelmed when they realize how much there is to learn. When this happens you should not give up you should stop, think, observe, analyze your technique and put a plan into place that will help you overcome the difficulties. Some areas that you will need to understand as you start learning the guitar:
It is important to get some idea of the complete picture, an idea of the result to be achieved, and how you will get there. Figuring out how to do that is hard for students, because they do not know enough about the complete process of becoming a musician. Beginning students do not know what to practice first, what skills are important to learn first, what goals they should accomplish first. It is easy to get overwhelmed by all the materials available. It is easy to buy books, but not so simple to figure out how to use them and learn from them.
Self-reliance is the best attitude you could have as you begin learning the guitar. A teacher cannot relieve you of your own responsibility to be alert and organized.
Create and maintain your day-to-day working method.
Play is a major avenue for learning to manage anxiety. It gives the child a safe space where she can experiment at will, suspending the rules and constraints of physical and social reality. In play, the child becomes master rather than subject.... Play allows the child to transcend passivity and to become the active doer of what happens around her.
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
Write things down such as schedules, routines, and the amount of practice time you do daily
Review your results frequently and make adjustments as needed
It is important right from the beginning that the student begins to develop, through proper practice, the attentiveness of sensations that lead to improved techniques. The necessary physical sensations that you want to watch for include:
The Light Finger
The Firm Finger
Heavy and Floating Arm
Among animals, symbols are transmitted by tradition from generation to generation, and it is here, if one wishes, that one may draw the border line between the “animal” and man. In animals, individually acquired experience is sometimes transmitted by teaching and learning, from elder to younger individuals, though such true tradition is only seen in those forms whose high capacity for learning is combined with a higher development of their social life. True tradition has been demonstrated in jackdaws, greyleg geese, and rats. But knowledge thus transmitted is limited to very simple things, such as pathfinding, recognition of certain foods and of enemies of the species, and—in rats—knowledge of the danger of poisons. However, no means of communication, no learned rituals are ever handed by tradition in animals. In other words, animals have no culture.
—Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)
A growing awareness of the body and active playing muscles
Once you have begun to train your fingers correctly, it is time to teach your fingers some of the basics of playing the guitar. It is important to make music as soon as possible. Learn a simple song and stay with that for approximately three months or until you can play it through smoothly. This is called, Vertical Growth and is the first kind of growth that you want to achieve. Once you have mastered that song, it is time to do some Horizontal Growth, adding more songs at the same skill level to build up your repertoire.
Learning to strum through chord changes smoothly is important. You do not want to be playing a song and have to stop the music every time you are changing a chord. Work with songs that you love and have a special meaning to you (as long as they are within your ability).
Many players suffer from learning and practicing scales while the hands and fingers were still full of tension and not developed properly. Because of this, they dread practicing them and their body is full of tension when they do. Scales are composed of complex physical movements, which must be studied carefully in careful detail before being put together into the movements for playing scales. Scales on guitar are difficult than they are on most other instruments. This is simply because every note is the result of the precise co-ordination of both hands, and the sound is not produced by just one finger, as in piano.
Learning a multifaceted skill like playing the guitar is not a linear process. Learning the guitar is more a set of synchronized processes, occurring and maturing together to produce the result.