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Old 06-26-2017, 07:23 AM
mattbn73 mattbn73 is offline
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Learn to practice well. It's the most important "skill" of a musician. Most of us, as guitarists, are not great at practicing. If you were never in school band or whatever, it's well worth spending some specific time on learning the skill of practicing well. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/14575...=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Get a teacher, even if it's monthly or every two months or whatever. Try several, over the next year or so, until you find one who knows what they're doing in this area. Get in the business of taking teachers "out for test drives etc".

I've never been an exceptional talent but I know how to practice better than most, and it's a very rare skill.

I'll mention one very common mistake, which you'll probably see mentioned in the book I linked above, and it's this: practicing only IN sections sections and not ever practicing transitions BETWEEN sections. This is a huge bang-for-your-buck improvement on practicing if you've done this. I find that most are blind to this problem. Again, it's a little harder to see the problem if you never took school band or piano lessons or whatever.

I find most students can play a difficult section in isolation, but they very often mess it up when they get to it initially, playing through the tune. The solution is usually to play last phrase of the first section going into the first note of the new section. Just stop when you reach that "first note". Practice it until it's clean, and then maybe add a note or two at a time, but honestly, once you practice the transition to the FIRST note, most of the other falls in the place.

This is what most of my students work on IN lessons. They see improvements in 20 minutes that they don't see in hours of practice throughout the rest of the week , when they're NOT doing this type of thing. I find that students who have school band experience generally don't require this kind of thing, because they already have the basic skills. But you can't skip this basic stuff.

Learn to practice. Check out the paperback book linked above. It's a food one. I think it's $11 or something. Start to think about the number of hours you spend playing/practicing versus the number of hours you spend developing practical and philosophical approaches to practicing ITSELF. Practicing WELL is the most important skill in learning to play an instrument, and in learning music more generally.
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