Thread: advice needed
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Old 11-02-2009, 04:57 PM
wcap wcap is offline
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I'll second the statement that it will probably take thousands of hours to master things to the point of starting to play some pieces really really well (so, maybe several years of playing an hour a day - well, that would be about 1000 hours I guess).

On one hand this might seem overwhelming and discouraging. But, especially if you are working on some pieces you enjoy and really want to learn, there are multiple small rewards along the way, as this piece or that piece gradually starts to come together. If you want to master this badly enough, you will actually enjoy the process a great deal.

So keep at it, and enjoy the ride along the way.

And before you know it you will be starting to sound pretty good.


In my case I played 5-string banjo badly for several years before things really started coming together. Two pieces over and over again, played badly for about a year, then started adding pieces. Nothing was played all that well for a while. But after about 3 years things really started to come together, and all of these pieces started sounding pretty good.

After about 30 years of banjo I got really seriously into guitar. Though I was not starting out from scratch (lots of technique transfered from banjo), it took me several years to start getting really comfortable with fingerstyle on guitar, and it took about 5 years (averaging no more than 1 hour of playing most days) before I was playing many, or any, of my fingerstyle pieces with enough reliability and precision to seriously consider performing them (e.g. in church) or recording them.

But I've had a blast getting to this point over the past 5 years or so, and I have a long way still to go.
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