This is the second part of my “Climbing the Mountain and Loving the Plateau” Series. Please be sure to read the first post, “Learn Guitar without Getting Stuck in a Rut.”
What does it mean to be “stuck in a rut?” I’ll attempt a quick and easy definition: A prolonged period of time where little to no advancement is made. I just got chills writing that out, it hits home pretty hard. All guitarists have this problem at some point, and getting out of this “rut” can be pretty difficult. The key to pulling yourself out of this situation is very clear. A change of mindset is required. Don’t worry, I’m not going to just tell you to “chill out” and chalk that up as my two cents. There are very distinct things we can do to change this mindset and in turn start to see progress on the guitar again.
“Climbing The Mountain” or “Vertical” Learning
In my first post in this series, I went over two different types of learning that I have identified. You can imagine this grid as a line graph. There is “Vertical” learning, or advancing skills, techniques, and overall knowledge of the instrument. Then there is “Horizontal” learning, or the progress you make honing in on each skill. This can be learning new songs, scales, or exercises. To put things in more poetic terms, we can call this “Climbing the Mountain” (horizontal) and “Loving the Plateau” (vertical).
Let’s explore what it means to “climb the mountain” of guitar playing. Real patience is required to scale this musical Matterhorn, as well as strategy and pacing. Trying to advance too quickly can cause some serious self doubt. This can also lead to over-practicing, which can lead to physical (and mental) injury. We all want to advance quickly, but it is much more important to advance correctly. This brings to mind the alternative to the famous phrase: Perfect practice makes perfect. Just practicing doesn’t cut it. You have to practice perfectly. If you just found what I said intimidating, don’t worry. Here are a couple pointers to help you implement this in your practice routine.
Have Very Clear Goals
Try to catch yourself next time you say, “I’m just not getting better at the guitar.” Maybe you’re saying this to yourself, a friend, or your teacher. (If you’re saying this to your teacher, try to think about whether or not you’re doing everything he or she is telling you to do. Many people (including myself) are guilty of receiving excellent lessons, only to go home and do something completely different during practice.) When you ask this question, be sure to follow it up with “Well, what are you trying to get better at?” If you’re response to that is “guitar, duhhh,” then you are setting yourself up for a vicious cycle of broadness. It’s time to seriously narrow down what your goals are.
If you’re lucky, you will be able to immediately identify what these goals are. Perhaps you’ve earned yourself the opportunity to skip this paragraph. If you’re not quite sure, start by thinking about what genre you’re playing. It’s also good to think about who your main inspirations are. What do those guitarists do that you’d like to do? Is there something all of these artists have in common? Perhaps you are trying to make an audition or get into a band that plays a specific genre. What are the requirements? Maybe there is just a song or group of songs that you’ve been trying to learn for a really long time without any sign of progress. Spend some time trying to figure out what techniques this song requires that you are falling short on.
Learn Guitar Exercises
If you’re anything like I was as a teenager, you would have seen the heading “Learn Exercises,” said “cool!” and left this page looking for new exercises to learn. Hold on! It’s not like that. I used to be like a sponge for exercises. Every website, every article in every Guitar World magazine I owned, every VHS tape I owned (OK, now I’m dating myself) had some fancy new exercise. “Increase your speed with this arpeggio sequence!” “Gain sick chops with this fancy chromatic trick!” It can be an information overload which can lead to very disorganized, distracted practice habits.
It’s important to take a step back to think “what do I need to get better at?” If you’re looking to get better at chord transitions, you want chordal exercises. If you want to improve your speed, you need to do some training with a metronome. Every skill has an endless amount of exercises that goes along with it, you can even make up exercises yourself based on the specific things that are hanging you up. Once as you have done your research, choose some favorites.
Routine, Routine, Routine
Continue for at least two weeks doing only two or three of these exercises every day. That’s right, that sentence is bold, italicized, AND underlined. If you want to get the full effect of the exercise, playing it once for five minutes is going to do nothing for you. If you are really looking to advance your skills, consistency is your best friend. Start every practice with the same exercises. This way you will advance your ability to control your fingers. If you have chosen your exercises well, you will find that you are subconsciously putting these new skills to work on every song you play. Sometimes, you may even find yourself reminding yourself of an exercise when you are getting hung up on a passage of a song.
If you are trying to advance your speed, don’t get ahead of yourself. (I’m not just talking to shredders when I say speed, this also refers to chord changes, arrangements, anything that you are incapable of playing at performance tempo.) Choose the metronome setting that is just enough of a challenge for you and stick with it for those two-three weeks. This may be painful for some readers, but your brain needs to really sink in to the challenge tempo.
Take Songs you want to Learn and Stick with them
Now that you have an exercise routine, spend some time figuring out what songs you want to learn that have been a challenge for you. Perhaps you may need to spend some time finding new songs to play. Only choose one or two depending on how much of a challenge they are. Make sure your song selection is something you are interested in learning, because you want to practice it every day for at least a month. If you find you need longer at the end of the month, don’t worry, just keep going.
In an age of immediate gratification, it is easy for us to get frustrated over lack of progress very quickly. Setting a goal with a time period of a month or longer allows us to relax and sink into a routine. Instead of saying to yourself “I’ve been playing this song for three days and I still can’t get it!” you will find you are simply saying “Day 3/30.”
If you find you haven’t mastered the song(s) after the month, don’t immediately start to get frustrated. Take a step back and consider what this month has done for your playing. You will find that you have absorbed a lot and that you are a better player for it. If you are sick of the song at the end of the month, put it down and start something new. You’ve earned it. If you still feel determined to master the song, by all means, go another month.
Consider Your Deadlines
If you are preparing for an audition or a performance, there can be a much larger element of stress to the feeling of lack of progress. You have no choice but to get better. In the end, that’s a great thing, but the process is stressful. For the sake of relevance, let’s say your audition/performance is one month away. Take some time to consider what you have to accomplish in this time and how many hours you have each day to do so. Then make a commitment to practice exactly what you need to every day for that thirty days. When you set a goal like this, you are less likely to slack on it. I don’t want to cheat my future self with an imperfect 29/30 days of practice.
Without doing this extra element of scheduling, it can be very easy to procrastinate (if you’re even the slightest bit like me, that is). You will find that the deadline is getting close and you haven’t been practicing. This causes an extra element of stress, which makes practicing even harder. “Cramming doesn’t work,” remember? If you stick with your pre-determined routine for the time period you have available, you will find that the performance you give is as close to the best you could do as possible. Feel like you could have done much better? Learn from your mistakes. Perhaps you needed much longer than a month to prepare, or the routine you had chosen wasn’t appropriate enough.
I have an a series about auditioning for college coming up soon!
Have Faith!
I have a lot of students who say to me “I’m practicing a lot every day, and I’m just not seeing results yet.” A lot of times they make this statement after demonstrating to me that they have come a long way in the past 7 days. I always say to them, “If you are putting the time in and having good, focused practice sessions, you will see results, you just have to keep at it.
The difference between their perception of improvement and my perception of their improvement is that they seeing their progress on a day-to-day basis. It’s hard to perceive change that way. If you plant a seed, put a chair in front of the pot, and watch the plant grow, you will find the process to not be rewarding because plants grow too slowly for spectators (with a natural amount of patience). If someone watches you plant the seed, goes away for a month, and comes back, they will return to see a fully grown plant.
A great way to help yourself realize your progress is to record yourself at the beginning of every week (or every day if you’d like). Each recording is like a snapshot of your progress. After a month, you will be shocked at how much better your recordings sound.
Learning an instrument really can be a leap of faith. There is so much time and money invested, and most of the time you never know when you will get where you want to be. By sticking to a routine, your practice really becomes “a practice,” and you will learn to see, hear, and feel tiny improvements in your skills from day to day.