5 Ways to Meet Your Guitar Goals This Year

This post offers guitar learners five tips to help organize themselves to meet learning and playing goals in 2012.

We're now well into the first quarter of the year and I hope you are progressing nicely towards your guitar goals. But if you are struggling, or even if you could just use a little boost, here are my tips to help you reach your guitar playing goals for the year.

Have a Goal

It’s obvious that if you don’t have a goal then you can’t reach it. Without a goal you might practice and play different things that you come across but you never really get anyplace you want to be; you’re in reactive mode.

 

To take control of your guitar progress have a picture of where you want to go with your guitar this year. Not a detailed plan, but a simple picture you can easily recall to mind. “This year I'd like to join a band”, for example.

 

Know Your Next Move

You have a goal for the year, great! A year seems like a long time, but is in fact all too short. To keep focus on progress throughout the year break your goal down into smaller steps; know at all times what your next move is.

 

Schedule Your Practice Time

If you want to get something done then schedule it. Take your guitar practice time seriously and set aside a specific time for it. If you just wait to let it happen when you're free you'll find that your time gets eaten up by other more pressing matters and you guitar practice will fall by the wayside.

 

Remember, the way a project gets a year late is one day at a time.

 

Organize Your Practice Time

If you don’t decide in advance what you’ll do when you practice then you can waste a lot of time. Take a little time each month, each week, to write down a plan of specific things you will work on. If you are serious about making progress then ensure that your plan includes a proportion of challenges so you’re not simply repeating what you already know.

 

Prepare Your Learning Material

As you make your plans prepare whatever learning material you need to put them into action. Don't rely on finding the lesson video you want on YouTube at the start of your practice session, that’s a recipe to spend your time watching videos instead of practicing. Choose your learning material – books, videos, tab – to match your goal and next moves in advance.

 

Here’s a quick recap of the five steps:

 

1. Have a goal – a picture of where you’d like to be in a year
2. Know your next move – set out a series of steps towards your goal
3. Schedule your practice time – don’t let it take a back seat
4. Organize your practice time – write down the things you’ll work on
5. Prepare your learning material – gather the books, tabs, videos you’ll need in advance

 

Get these five fundamentals in place and you’re well on your way to reaching your guitar goals this year.

Confessions of a Sloppy Player

Today I’m happy to share with you a guest post from Dan Vuksanovich…

 

I never set out to be a sloppy player. I don’t think anyone ever does. When I first started playing the
guitar I had visions of Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen in my head. I was going to be a jaw-dropping,
pyrotechnic-slinging, immortal, history-making axemaster. Little did I know that I was planting the first
seeds of sloppiness before I ever even picked up the instrument.

 

Along the way I picked up bad habit after bad habit on my way to sloppytown. Here I confess my guitar
missteps for your educational benefit. Behold the recipe for becoming a sloppy player:

• Overreaching – Wanting to be Randy Rhoads right out of the gate caused me to attempt to learn
  music that was far too advanced for my skill level at the time. What do you get when you’re an
  absolute beginner trying to play the solo from “Crazy Train”? Sloppy playing.
• Impatience – The mere act of attempting to play advanced music too soon was not the whole
  problem, but the impatience and unwillingness to do anything other than play note-for-note
  transcriptions at the recorded tempo was a killer. Advanced pieces of music can be simplified
  and slowed down to make them accessible for intermediate or even beginner level players, but I
  had no time for this, and I paid for it in the end with an incalculable number of mistakes.
• Frustration – I hated the sloppy player I had become, but frustration was the worst possible
  response. Once frustrated, I would grit my teeth, tense up, and… you guessed it… become even
  sloppier.
• Rationalization – Not wanting to admit that I had some problems that I needed to fix let to
  rationalization. I came up with a ridiculous number of reasons why being sloppy was OK. My
  fingers were too thin. My pinky was too short. I had started playing the guitar too late in life. It
  was all BS, but I believed every word of it.

 

Somehow I made it through college and the conservatory and ultimately earned my Master of Music
degree, but it felt hollow. I was nowhere near the player that I wanted to be, and it tore me up inside. I
eventually quit for a number of years because playing the guitar was pure misery.

 

In my 30s I cleared my head, vowed to start over and figure out where I’d gone wrong. Based on my
experience, here are some ingredients for becoming a solid player:

 

• Humility – It’s not listed up there with the recipe for being a sloppy player, but arrogance
  definitely played some part as well. It was beyond humbling for me to admit that I had spent
  so much time doing things wrong and had probably cost myself a chance at being a successful
  professional musician in the process. The admission, however, allowed me to start fresh and
  approach the instrument differently than I had in the past.
• Taking Ownership – There’s a lot of information (and misinformation) out there about how to
  play and how to get better. It’s surprisingly easy to drown in a sea of conflicting information. In
  the end I simply had to decide for myself, based on common sense and logical thought, what
  made sense and what didn’t, and adjust accordingly as I went along. Sometimes the answers
  aren’t found in your teacher’s studio or on YouTube. Sometimes the answers are inside you and
  you just need to ask yourself what they are.
• Enjoying the Process of Learning – In stark contrast to my experiences with the guitar earlier in
  life, I now focus on the learning process rather than just the desired outcomes. Sure, one day I’d
  still love to be as good as my guitar idols, but if I never get there, it’s OK. It may seem completely
  counterintuitive, but the mere act of allowing yourself to fail will make it more likely that you
  will succeed. Enjoying the learning process instead of beating myself up for not being Eddie Van
  Halen yet has turned my time with the guitar into a completely enjoyable, almost meditative
  experience. I’m getting better at an almost alarming rate, especially for someone who’s almost
  40.

 

These days, at the age of 37, I’m still cleaning up all the messes I made of my playing, and I’m having an
absolute blast doing it. The feeling of accomplishment, of overcoming something that has plagued me
for the better part of my life, is unexplainably wonderful.

 

About the author: Dan Vuksanovich received his Master of Music degree in classical guitar performance
from the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University in 1999. He currently teaches and blogs
about how to get better at guitar via his website, www.whyisuckatguitar.com.

Guitar Bends – Get Rid of Unwanted Noise

One of the problems I experienced when I learned to play bends on the guitar was the unwanted noises that came from strings next to the one I was bending. I got similar problems too when playing pull-offs and trills and even when playing single note lines where I would sometimes accidentally hit the wrong string with the pick. These noises are especially problematic when playing on an amplified electric guitar.

 

I struggled with these noises for a long time before accidentally stumbling across the playing techniques required to avoid them. In this video from Griff Hamlin you can discover how to block out unwanted strings by muting them with your picking or fretting hand.

 

 

I hope you enjoyed the video and learned some useful new techniques from it. If you’d like to learn more from Griff then check out some more free stuff from his Blues Guitar Unleashed course (affiliate link).