THE HARDEST PART ABOUT PLAYING GUITAR
Tell me if this sounds familiar to you.
It’s right after you’ve finished practicing guitar. You’ve been feeling motivated lately to really try and push yourself so you’ve started learning a song that’s been stopping you dead in your tracks for a long time now. You’ve got most of it nailed but there’s a few bars, two or three, that you just cannot play.
So you’ve been grinding. Repeating this unbeatable lick slowly for hour upon hour, day upon day, maybe even weeks or months, and you’ve made some progress! You click up to 100% speed, the count in, and you suddenly realise that the end is still so far out of reach. It’s like your hands just simply don’t have the mechanical abilities to match this piece of music that inspired you to get better in the first place.
TWO BARS! Just two bars that continue to defeat you. If you could just get them even sort of accurate you could finish the song…
Your guitar’s back in it’s stand and now you’re left with a million questions. What am I doing wrong? Is there a technique that will help? How much more practice will it take?
Will I ever be as good as I want to be?…
That’s where I am right now. I just put my guitar down and that’s why I’m writing this. I don’t think that it’s just me that feels this way about their guitar playing so I wanted to share my thoughts with you in the hope that we can help each other deal with what I think is the hardest part of playing guitar.
The Self Doubt.
You’ve got to wonder if there’s a cap to your own abilities, right? I can tell you for certain that I do. I always have done.
I’ve never considered myself to be a particularly good guitar player and there are a lot of aspects to my playing that I think absolutely suck. There comes a point where the thought of whether this is as good as you’ll ever be will creep into your mind and, once it’s there, it’s a difficult thing to shake.
The thing with this idea is that it’s so damaging. It’ll hang over whatever you’re practicing, learning, or composing like a freezing fog that will stop you in place as soon as things get difficult and it’s not easy to ignore.
But here’s the thing. How will you ever know if you don’t keep going?
There’s only one way to find out how good you can truly be at guitar and that is to just keep playing. It’s as simple as that.
I want to know how good I can really be on this instrument because I love it. Sometimes I absolutely f***ing hate it when I’m 2 hours into another practice session and I’m making little to no gains on that BPM but, if I’m honest, I’d rather be sat sucking at guitar than doing a hell of a lot of other stuff, right?
It all comes down to what you want to get out of the instrument. For me, I want to push myself, to write music, to try and have a least a little positive impact on people’s lives through guitar. If I don’t keep going I can only be sure of two things:
I’ll never know whether that’s possible
I’d regret it forever if I gave up
So here’s what you’ve got to do. Accept the fact that the guitar is not an easy thing to master and the self doubt will always be a part of it as long as you care about it. That’s the reason it’s there.
If you didn’t give a damn about playing you wouldn’t care whether you improved or not. The fact you doubt yourself is a natural consequence of that when things get hard. Use that same passion to keep playing, keep working at it, and prove to yourself that the time and effort is worth it. In the end, the fact you’re playing is all that matters.
Also, remember to go easy on yourself. You don’t have to be able to shred in like 2 days time! This is a life long pursuit and you’ve got all that time to get there.
At least that’s how I feel about it right now! I’d love to know whether you’ve experienced this same thing and how you handle it. Let me know if you enjoyed reading this too, just me talking through ideas here, because my brain runs on overtime and writing like this helps lol!
Take care mate, stay safe. I’ll see you later.
Jack
PS. If anyone wants to know what lick is currently ruining my brain, go to 2:59 on this track 😫 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyZhbWey7Po
