Gibson's Learn & Master Guitar Blog With Steve Krenz | 7-habits-of-highly-unsuccessful-guitar-learners

7 Habits of Highly Unsuccessful Guitar Learners

Monday, July 21, 2014
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1) Practice Only on Days You "Feel" Like It.
Some days you’ll feel inspired to work on your learning – other days you won’t. Feelings will come and go. The best progress will come with consistent, daily, focused effort. Waiting to feel inspired will cause you to miss out on a lot of progress that you could be making.

2) Talk About Guitar More Than Practice Guitar.
Talking about guitar and dreaming about guitar can never take the place of getting your guitar out and spending time practicing. The guitarists who get the results are those that quietly keep going into the practice room to face head on the task of improving. Wannabes talk about practicing, guitar players practice.

3) Practice What You Can Already Play.
Don’t waste precious practice time by playing material that you can already play well. Practice time is valuable. Make the most of every minute by going straight to the problem areas in your learning. Endlessly going over things that you can already play gives the illusion that progress is being made when actually little progress is occurring because you are not challenging yourself musically. Spend practice time working on things that you can’t do. It’s in the struggle of trying to do new things that real progress is made.

4) Don’t Play for Anyone.
Unsuccessful learners learn guitar in isolation and think to themselves "who would want to hear me play, I’m not good enough yet." Successful players realize that making music was never designed to be a solo endeavor. Regularly playing for others – at whatever level you are at – is a vital part of your learning. Some musical concepts can only be learned through the act of performing. Guitar playing involves a constant in-flow of new information and out-flow of using that information to perform.

5) Expect Lasting Results Quickly.
Real learning takes time. Unsuccessful learners mistakenly think that significant improvement should be visible after practicing two or three times or even a full week. When it doesn’t happen they get discouraged and even quit when progress takes longer than expected. Music learning is a slow process. Mastery doesn’t come quickly. Practice smart and be patient. The results will come.

6) Stop When Things Get Tough.
Guitar playing should be easy, right? Unsuccessful learners think that guitar playing should come naturally and be relatively easy. When something is harder to learn and takes a bit longer they think that something is wrong and often quit. Don’t let your musical future be cut short because you hit something difficult. Persevere. Roll up your musical sleeves and keep chipping away at the problem. The breakthrough will eventually come.

7) See Challenges from Only One Perspective.
Ever seen someone try to remove a tree stump? They push it and pull it, rock it back and forth from every possible angle to dislodge it. They try everything thing they can think of to make progress. Approach a guitar learning challenge in the same way. Don’t view a guitar learning challenge – whether learning barre chords or pentatonic scales or whatever – from one angle. Music is wonderfully interconnected – there is always more than one way to approach a problem. The main thing is to keep wrestling with it until you master it.

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