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@JoeT – Hang in there as all the others have said. It will take time. When I first joined TAC in May of 2020, I had recently picked up the guitar after a 35 year lay off (I might add that back in the day I was never really any good to begin with). I did the 30-day thing and I remember thinking this should really be more like a 90- or 120-day event – I didn’t come close to getting most of those exercises right in 30 days (I still go back and visit some of them occasionally). I actually wish Tony would change the name as after 30 days I kind of felt like I failed because I really could not do a lot of the exercises with any kind of accuracy, when in reality I made progress.
Then I moved on to the first daily warmup exercise. It was the tried-and-true Finger picking WU-18 Ring Finger Staircase. I couldn’t even come close to doing it no matter how long I kept at it and then I was supposed to hit the complete button? I felt like I was deceiving myself. The rest of the week was a similar experience. Meanwhile I am reading all the comments for the daily exercises and there are all the happy go lucky TACers just chatting away about how much fun these were and great they sounded etc. I felt like I was on a different planet. I was filling out the journal at the end of the week and there was a question about “What went well with your guitar playing this week”? I wrote down Absolutely Nothing – that’s how frustrated I was.
But I soldiered on and eventually bought into Tony’s approach. I showed up every day and did the exercises, went back did some of the old ones that I thought might be good to know, worked on bits and pieces of songs, etc. I even transitioned from Annual Membership to Lifer. There are a lot of other on-line venues out there that teach guitar and some are really good, but none are using the approach Tony has developed and none have the same level of passion and positive coaching/encouragement that he offers.
Here I am 2+ years later and still at it every day anywhere from 30 minutes to 2.5 hours (in multiple sessions). Am I good? No. Am I better? For sure. Am I having fun? Yep. Do I enjoy it? Yep. Do I still get frustrated? Yep, sometimes. There are some licks I have practiced hundreds and hundreds (maybe over a thousand) of times and still don’t hit them accurately consistently – very frustrating. There is a site called the Acoustic Guitar Forum that is pretty good for overall general information. The old timers on there have a saying when some member express frustration about learning a song or whatever = “Nothing that 10 years won’t fix” 😁. They of course are exaggerating and I am not sure I have 10 years. 😅 But the message is the same – keep at it and hang in there. Nothing more satisfying then actually getting a run down that was out of reach earlier. When the frustration sets in, I just walk away for a while, or on rare occasions step away for day. If we are gone for a week or two, I now find that when we get back home, I can’t wait to pick up the guitar again.
I targeted that frustrating WU-18 and made it part of my daily warmup. It took a while, but I have conquered it! But I still hit it every day just as a reminder of how far I have come and also because it is a good warmup.