Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben1101
Hi,
I've been playing guitar on and off for the best part of 5 years, teaching myself songs via tabs online. I like the fingerpicking style and have learnt a few songs from artists like John Mayer, Ben Howard, Bert Jansch & some of Sungha Jung's arrangements of songs.
I'm at a stage now that whenever I pick up my guitar I play the same few songs, or parts of songs over and over again and It's driving me mad. Even when I'm learning new songs I seem to always resort back to playing the same stuff after 10 minutes.
I got bought a Martin GPCPA5 and It's helped me decide that I want to progress more with my learning rather than just play the same stuff as I seem to be stuck in a stage without gaining any other knowledge other than just learning a new song by following a tab. Ideally I'd like to be able to jam along with other guitarists without having to first spend weeks learning the same songs.
Do any of you have any suggestions on what I should do to start? I did go through a stage of learning music theory but after getting told by a few other guitarist that it's possibly not the best way to get where I went, I stopped.
Any advice you can give would be greatly appreciated!
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With or without a teacher, you need to organize and structure your practice time if you want to accomplish certain goals and stop running around in circles.
The first step is to figure out where you want to go.
Then you have to figure out what things are going to get you there.
Then figure out how much of your practice time to devote to each thing you need to work on.
An example would be breaking a 2 hour session into 4 half-hour parts:
Pt1 - warm up on a tune you already know. Pick a different one each time. Go back and work through any spots that need improvement.
Pt2 - Now that you're warmed up you could work on technique... picking hand and fingerboard hand exercises for speed, accuracy, tone, control, etc...
Pt3 - Chord and scale theory. Things like learning major and minor scales in 5 or 7 positions up and down the fingerboard in every key or learning major, minor and 7th chord inversions up and down the neck.
Pt4 - Work on a new piece of music or practice improvising melodies over basic chord progressions.