For many, learning guitar is like a credit card. All too often, people use a credit card as a substitute for cash. Blindly swiping it to purchase things they can’t truly afford, and quickly accumulating a houseful of stuff that often winds up forgotten in a closet, collecting dust.
The analogy can be applied to learning guitar in that many guitar students make a mad dash to acquire a plethora of new information as fast as possible – but in the end, wind up with a lot of time invested into un-remembered concepts, and un-mastered licks, at the bottom of a nearly empty shopping cart.
It’s perfectly natural to have the desire to accumulate guitar knowledge and skills quickly. We all want to become accomplished players in the shortest amount of time.
The mistake is to jump into playing guitar with the assumption that it will happen overnight. The result of that mindset can leave you, in terms of mastering the guitar, bankrupt.
A more sage approach would be to view learning guitar in terms of a savings account.
Building a healthy nest egg is usually a slow, long term process. Sock away a few dollars consistently every week, and before long, the balance grows.
In terms of learning guitar, a “one lick at a time” approach will build your account faster, and take you farther than you can imagine.
By focusing all of your attention on learning one new lick, mastering one new skill, or grasping one new concept daily – and incorporating that one new thing into your playing before moving on – you experience a consistent sense of accomplishment on the guitar, while becoming a skilled player, almost without realizing it.
And like a savings account that also increases by the benefit of compound interest – you will find that the “deposits” you made learning licks and riffs played by others, slowly start to pay off as they morph into ideas for new licks and riffs that eventually become uniquely yours, and part of your own style.
Take the 30 Day Challenge
For the next 30 days, make a vow to learn just one new lick, riff, chord or concept per day. Just one. Stay focused on that one new thing until you have it mastered. Even if you learn it quickly, stop there and don’t try to learn any more.
The next day, brush up on what you learned the previous day first – then work on something new. The day after that, review all the licks (riffs, chords, etc.) you have learned up to that point before tackling a new one, and so on…
You will find that by slowly and consistently making deposits in your guitar playing “account”, and reviewing them until they become ingrained into your playing (compound interest), at the end of one month you will have built up a healthy balance sheet, and you might just surprise yourself at how much better of a guitar player you have become!
