Why Focus Can Save You From Guitar Soup
What do you think you need to learn guitar? Maybe finger speed and agility springs to mind, or a musical ear, the ability to read music, or knowledge of musical theory.
Maybe you believe that only a select few born with musical talents like these can learn to play guitar? The truth is that focus, a simple quality that anybody can apply, is more important than any of these skills.
Where Are You Going? You want to learn guitar, but where do you begin? There is an abundance of advice, lessons and information on learning guitar.
It's easy to be overwhelmed by all the questions and choices you must make when you learn.
Focus will help you to find a path in this crowded jungle.
Create a clear, but general, picture in your mind of what you want to achieve.
For example, you might want to play and sing a few popular songs with friends.
Or maybe you'd love to play guitar in a rock band, or play beautiful classical guitar pieces.
Whatever your general direction is make sure it represents only style of music.
You might like many styles and would love to play them all.
But at the outset you should focus on only one style and learn its repertoire and basic skills.
Later, when you have a solid foundation you can branch out if you wish to.
Learn Through Repetition When you focus within one style - acoustic blues guitar, say - the same skills and theory will crop up again and again.
These repeated encounters make it easier to learn and retain them.
Time to Revise When you learn a new song or skill, it's not the end of the story.
You have to revise regularly to maintain your playing level.
If you don't you will regress and you'll forget how to play songs that were once easy to you.
You'll have more and more to revise as you acquire more skills and repertoire.
If you don't have a lot of free time this workload will become too much for you to manage.
Focus on one style helps to limit your revision load because the same skills are used repeatedly.
One Thing At a Time Focus help you, too, at the detailed level of guitar practice.
It takes a huge number of complex muscle movements to play guitar.
With time these movements become instinctive, but when you learn you will have to concentrate a lot to make them.
You must develop the ability to break things down into simple parts.
Your brain will get confused if it has too many things to deal with it and be unable to control all the movements.
At this point you'll make lots of uncontrolled movements that cause errors, bad playing and frustration.
Focus on only one problem at a time when you practice.
Work with one hand, one string, one finger.
As you master each part you can add a new one to it to achieve the end result of playing a chord, a scale, or an exercise.
As you begin to learn guitar keep the key word "focus" at the front of your mind.
If you don't you can easily end up lost in a soup of unrelated lessons and unable to play the guitar music of your dreams.
Maybe you believe that only a select few born with musical talents like these can learn to play guitar? The truth is that focus, a simple quality that anybody can apply, is more important than any of these skills.
Where Are You Going? You want to learn guitar, but where do you begin? There is an abundance of advice, lessons and information on learning guitar.
It's easy to be overwhelmed by all the questions and choices you must make when you learn.
Focus will help you to find a path in this crowded jungle.
Create a clear, but general, picture in your mind of what you want to achieve.
For example, you might want to play and sing a few popular songs with friends.
Or maybe you'd love to play guitar in a rock band, or play beautiful classical guitar pieces.
Whatever your general direction is make sure it represents only style of music.
You might like many styles and would love to play them all.
But at the outset you should focus on only one style and learn its repertoire and basic skills.
Later, when you have a solid foundation you can branch out if you wish to.
Learn Through Repetition When you focus within one style - acoustic blues guitar, say - the same skills and theory will crop up again and again.
These repeated encounters make it easier to learn and retain them.
Time to Revise When you learn a new song or skill, it's not the end of the story.
You have to revise regularly to maintain your playing level.
If you don't you will regress and you'll forget how to play songs that were once easy to you.
You'll have more and more to revise as you acquire more skills and repertoire.
If you don't have a lot of free time this workload will become too much for you to manage.
Focus on one style helps to limit your revision load because the same skills are used repeatedly.
One Thing At a Time Focus help you, too, at the detailed level of guitar practice.
It takes a huge number of complex muscle movements to play guitar.
With time these movements become instinctive, but when you learn you will have to concentrate a lot to make them.
You must develop the ability to break things down into simple parts.
Your brain will get confused if it has too many things to deal with it and be unable to control all the movements.
At this point you'll make lots of uncontrolled movements that cause errors, bad playing and frustration.
Focus on only one problem at a time when you practice.
Work with one hand, one string, one finger.
As you master each part you can add a new one to it to achieve the end result of playing a chord, a scale, or an exercise.
As you begin to learn guitar keep the key word "focus" at the front of your mind.
If you don't you can easily end up lost in a soup of unrelated lessons and unable to play the guitar music of your dreams.