Acoustic Guitar Lessons DVD: Learn Whenever You Want To
Imagine yourself having the skills that you desire. Focus on that and concentrate. Convince yourself that you can do it. Convince yourself that you are already on your way to reaching your first goal – because you are. Its easier to manifest your desires when you can imagine yourself already in possession of it. Keep your positive mental attitude always.
Of course you will be working on many guitar skills: various guitar techniques, chords, scales, soloing, etc., but don’t neglect other skills that are not guitar specific like, ear training (also called aural skills), songwriting, improvising, creativity, reading, music theory, etc.
The first step is to stop thinking of yourself as merely a guitarist. I’ll take this one step further and recommend against thinking of yourself as a musician! You are, or are at least learning to become, an artist.
As weeks and months go by, your old “bad habit” will begin to weaken, it will change. It will be replaced by the new finger action you are training into the fingers. The important point to realize is that the new habit will take over, if you are doing the proper proportion of correct practice on the bad habit.
You should be a well rounded player and learn lots of different styles of music to become a good guitarist. This is one of the most ridiculous statements I have ever heard on the subject.
Segovia (the classical guitar master) wasn’t well rounded – he didn’t waste his time to master jazz or bluegrass for example. Yngwie Malmsteen didn’t study intense jazz guitar. Most great jazz guitarists don’t study classical guitar or heavy metal guitar.
Measure your progress. Document your practice time. Keep a record of how much you practice each day. For technique things, use a metronome to see how fast you are able to play a particular scale, exercise, lick, arpeggio, etc. cleanly. Write down the result, practice it all week and see if you can play it one or two beats per minute faster by next week (or next month).
They are masters of their style, they are specialists, not a jack-of-all-trades type of player. Don’t listen to people who say something like, You must learn blues before you can learn heavy metal or classical guitar.You do not have to be well rounded.
