“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
For a beginner guitarist
There is no more important and significant issue than planning guitar lessons. Without a good and detailed plan that has the smallest moments, you will have no chance of achieving the desired result. Your results might be much worse if you do not have your own handwritten work items for achieving a goal.
If you've tried to learn guitar on your own, then you know it's not as easy as it looks. If you used the Internet to learn and failed, that’s okay. Don’t be sad! This article is for you.
The main problems for all beginner guitarists are poor time management and no understanding of where to start. The ideal variant is to allow a qualified guitar teacher to managing the learning process. You shouldn’t look for some methods and ways of learning on your own because, without proper experience and knowledge, you can get be easily confused and choose the wrong way.
An experienced teacher knows that a crucial feature of successful and interesting tuition is a methodical program. In an invisible way, this professional chooses the right way of learning and a student starts to move in the right direction. You get started on hand-setting and body posture, guitar anatomy, tuning, using accessories in the process of learning, notes and strings. Step by step you will develop your skills without stopping to useless attempts to reinvent the wheel.
Homework Tips
Tip 1. Homework session
In the beginning, your homework must be completed within a time period ranging from 45 minutes to a couple of hours. For you to know, the best world’s guitarists practice 10-12 hours a day and they do it easily and completely relaxed.
Our homework usually consists of:
- Warm-up exercises - 10 minutes.
- Practice memorizing the guitar fretboard - 15 minutes.
- Reading notes from the sheet - 5 minutes.
- A song or a music work analysis - 15-90 minutes.
Tip 2. Note all about your results and training
For example, yesterday we played a chromatic exercise on 80 bpm (eighth notes), and today it is 85 bpm. This success must be noted. Yesterday we didn’t have a successful introduction of the song, but today we have the first two bars quite well. It should also be written down immediately! You do this because the next time we’ll start with the bars that didn’t work before and so on.
You need to have a notebook and write down the date and the description of your results. Write briefly and clearly. Do this task with interest and pleasant anticipation of achieving a new goal. It is very important to follow your own development and not to fall into the psychological trap while learning to play the guitar. It is a bad idea to master constantly difficult parts and moments. It doesn't work like that. You need to understand that it is only a little pause in personal development and all you need is a little bit more time.
Tip 3. Time management
Richard Branson said: “If you don't have time for the small things, you won't have time for the big things.” Time management is a very important issue if we are talking about playing the guitar. It’s much easier for an adult to concentrate and focus on one important task. A mature student can sit still and practice. But this task might be much more difficult for kids. Guitar lessons for children are fruitful work of all three parties (parents + pupil + teacher). At first, it is the parents who organize the homework, then the child has to do it regularly and independently.
Why are people not getting better at guitar?
It’s very simple. When there is a detailed plan of study and learning, there is a better chance of achieving a goal. You have fewer false representations and doubts in your head. When there is no structure of a lesson, you may get easily confused in terminology and the sequence of exercises. It might be that some of the exercises you don’t have to play at all. But you’ve watched too many videos and think that playing a million different exercises will help you to learn to play the guitar.
For example, in the methodological guide «Guitar for Beginners» each skill is strengthened by special and phased-in exercises. Such learning is accompanied by reading notes from a sheet, developing a sense of rhythm, learning to read chord charts, studying rhythmic patterns, etc.
We like music because it makes us feel good. Music is a catching emotion. If you don’t know how to play the guitar, go and study with a professional teacher. It’s best to start from scratch and pretend to be an open-minded child!