Posted on: 26 September, 2012
Author: Mike Philippov
One of the most common situations you will find yourself in during the process of improving your musical skills is the scenario of facing a certain obstacle in your guitar playing and feeling cl... One of the most common situations you will find yourself in during the process of improving your musical skills is the scenario of facing a certain obstacle in your guitar playing and feeling clueless on how to overcome it. Your ability to find a solution to the problems you face in your guitar practicing will make all the difference between you becoming the guitar player you want to be and you joining the unfortunate majority of guitarists who either give up playing their instrument completely or settle for being less than they can be as musicians. The good news is that if you have both of your hands operating properly it means that you CAN learn to solve any guitar playing problems you encounter. Although it isnt realistic to suggest a single cookie-cutter method for overcoming all conceivable problems on guitar, there are some proven steps you can take that will get you closer to finding the solution that you need for the problem at hand. The next time you feel your guitar playing becoming stuck, apply the 5 steps listed below to jump start your progress: 1. Get Specific In order to effectively approach any guitar problem or challenge you must first get crystal clear on exactly WHAT it is you need to fix. As common-sense as this advice sounds, I get daily emails from guitar players who describe their guitar challenges with vague phrases such as: I am bad at improvising or I cant improve my speed or I need help with rhythm guitar. Until you learn to get A LOT more specific in pinpointing exactly where and how your problem appears in your guitar playing there is virtually no chance for you to correctly fix it. In addition to the obvious reason for needing to know what the problem is in order to work on it, breaking down a much bigger issue (such as general difficulty with improvising) into a series of specific and smaller tasks will make it a lot less overwhelming to practice towards mastering them. When doing this step in the process of solving your guitar problems, fill in the blanks of the following sentence: I have difficulties with (put guitar/music skill here) whenever I (describe a precise musical situation here). 2. Magnify the difficulty A seemingly counterintuitive problem solving technique for guitar (which is nonetheless HIGHLY effective) involves taking a challenge that you find difficult to overcome and think of a way to make the difficulty even greater. What this will do is force you to pay greater attention to coming up with the most effective way of solving this issue and most importantly it will make the original problem feel MUCH easier than ever before (by comparison). Doing this involves being creative to think of how to place extra restrictions or difficulties upon the passage you are trying to play that isolate the main problem you are facing. To check out several specific ways of applying this practicing technique into your guitar playing, watch this free video about practicing guitar correctly. Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com