Learn Acoustic Guitar DVD: Make Your Own Study Schedule
Understand that becoming a better guitarist means becoming a better musician as well. When developing your musical skills, make sure to think beyond skills that are specific to guitar.
If you can’t find a teacher who can do this for you, pay someone (YES I said PAY) to help you develop a specific plan to do this. The best person to approach for this is someone who is already doing whatever it is that you want to be doing.
The way you view yourself (as an artist and not merely someone who owns a guitar and plays it sometimes) is very important to the way you will think about what you are doing musically. The way you see yourself will also effect the results you will get as you are expressing yourself.
Don’t compare yourself to others. There is no need to do this anyway. Music should not be a competitive sport among people, only within yourself. Compare yourself only in relation to where you are in your strategy! Are you on your way to reaching your next short term and medium term goal towards your ultimate goals? Are you on schedule, does your strategy need to be revised?
As I have said, some people become paralyzed, afraid to play, afraid of undoing work done in practice sessions by what they do when they play. And for those who play professionally, it is of course, absolutely necessary that they continue to play, even if they are doing “remedial” work on their technique.
You can undo bad habits you have learned along the way. You can begin the process of undoing bad habits right away, when you begin to acquire the correct understandings, and use the approaches based on them.
This is the most close-minded philosophy I can think of. Musical skills are tools. One should want to obtain and master as many of these tools as will be needed to reach your goals. Doing that alone won’t work well and even if it does eventually work, it will take 10 times as long! Besides, how will you know if what you are trying to do is original if you don’t learn about what has already been done?
Absolutely spend a good amount of time in practicing reversing that habit. Practice in a new way, where you make sure you do what you weren’t doing before. Analyze the essence of that bad habit, extract it from it’s musical context, and perhaps make up “auxillary exercises” based on the essence of it. Use all the practice techniques that I teach to effectively begin this process of reversal.
