Time, Patience, and Perseverance

Learning to play the guitar is a priceless skill for life. All it takes is just a little time, patience, and perseverance

This, I’m afraid, is a picture of me when I first started learning to play. The guitar is mine, but unfortunately the car was not.

At 18 I started learning the guitar relatively late, but was obsessed at improving. I had been writing songs and singing live with a piano, but found the whole experience extremely frustrating. It was at a Ralph McTell concert that I saw the light. Here was a guy with a guitar on a stage all by himself. It looked and sounded so complete; being able to engage in the three most powerful elements of music – melody (voice), harmony (chords), and strumming (rhythm) made it all the more powerful. On that 10th row of the Cornwall Coliseum I looked at him and realised that that was what I wanted to do.

In the weeks and months following I took a few informal lessons from friends, but knew that I had to get my fingers used to the new regime. I understood about muscle memory and probably played most days, but would not leave it more that 2 or 3 before picking it up and reminding my fingers that I was getting serious!

It all depends on what you want to do. If you see people who are confident on their instrument  and want to be like that, then it’s a simple case of getting your head down and doing the work. The first 3-6 months are just breaking your fingers in. Pick a few exercises, set yourself some goals and speed tests, and just keep at it. If you are consistent, you will see a difference – that’s a law of life.

Seeing yourself improve (however slowly) will motivate you to continue and progress. Can’t change between one chord and another in rhythm? Fed up with the time it takes for your fingers to get to the next chord? Repetition is the key. Downstrum the chord of E. Downstrum the chord of A. Count how many times you can change between those chords in one minute. Keep the quality up (i.e. don’t settle for too much scruffy muffled buzzing), and try and make sure as many notes are as clean as possible. Do a ‘best out of 3’ every day and compare numbers. In two weeks you will see a huge difference (much quicker if you give more time). You may start out with 15 chord changes in a minute. Watch that number increase!

The process of improving with E and A will hugely help your improvement with every other chord change you work at. Practise little and often; you don’t have to go crazy especially if you have the sort of personality (like mine) where you sometimes get obsessed for a few weeks and run out of steam because you’ve over-saturated the situation!

Give a little time each day, an amount you can manage five times a week. Have a little patience; don’t judge your own performance until maybe a month goes by, and compare what you are capable of now to back then. Video yourself attempting an exercise, and go back to it in 2 weeks. If you’ve been consistent, you will see a difference trust me! Have a little perservance; give yourself one month to start with. Suspend all self-criticism until then, and at that point stand back and evaluate your performance. This law of life will be evident; keep at something for long enough and you will see a difference – go for it!