Key Of Grey

December 27th. 2008 – I’ve been playing guitar on and off for about 9 years. I wouldn’t say I’m a great guitarist by any means, but my skill is adequate for what I need it for. When I first started, I took a few months of lessons but then couldn’t afford to continue, so I started teaching myself. In my first year of playing, I would practice on average 5-7 hours a day, everyday. Scales, arpeggios, speed and accuracy drills, I tried it all. However, at the end of the day it didn’t help as much as I had hoped.

I’m pretty sure that my wasted time came down to not learning intelligently. I figured I could just cram it all in. The truth is, I had great technique, but no way to apply it to anything. In essence, my guitar skills were useless for actual music. As I slowly realized this, my interest waned. Over the years, I got interested for a while and would dive head first into practicing again, and then I would give up.

Today I was reading a post on HowStuffWorks titled “How to Play 4 Guitar Licks“. What’s interesting is that there is a teacher talking you through learning each of the licks and explaining the theory behind why and how each lick should be used. When I was teaching myself, I would learn the licks of my favorite artists but as for applying any theory outside that artist’s actual song? No chance. The HowStuffWorks post made me think about how I was teaching myself all those years back. Without someone explaining to me why something was used, or what it was for, I was at a disadvantage and not good enough to figure it out myself.

Learning from a tutorial or tabs, the exact solo down to fingering and intonation from a song is great if you want to play that song exactly like that artist. But learning why it sounds so good and how to adapt it for your own uses without completely ripping it off, is something else entirely. Playing exactly like SRV is an impressive technical feat, but you won’t be revolutionary, or even evolutionary. You’ll be an SRV clone. If that’s what you want, then great, but it’s not for me.

A person can learn guitar without a teacher; learning anything takes motivation. But with the right teacher, that same motivated person could accelerate their learning. If I had stuck with my teacher (he was great), I probably wouldn’t have fallen off track and those thousands of hours of practice would have helped even more. A good teacher is a mentor, he has been through what you are experiencing now and has insight as to what will get you to the next level. It’s good to be inspired by a real person; sometimes in this digital age we forget how helpful real life interaction can be. I wonder if my old teacher is still teaching, I should look him up.

Here’s my favorite tutorial from the iVideoSongs sponsored HowStuffWorks post.