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Shiny Song Syndrome
I have been trying to focus on adding some more songs into my “Performance” category and it hasn’t gone that well. I spent the past couple of days doing a post mortem to figure out why it hasn’t gone well and what I need to do going forward to fix it. The analysis revealed that for the past few months I have had what I’m calling “Shiny Song Syndrome”. I will hear a song played by a another guitar player, or a song we play at the weekly guitar jam, or a song on the radio, or see a YouTube video, etc and think to myself…”I really like that song, I should learn how to play it”. I will then spend the next 3-7 days playing that song during practice. That part is OK, the problem is that sometime during that 3-7 days I will hear another song and say “Oooooh, I should be playing that song instead”. Rinse-Repeat.
The end result is that I have started playing 37 new songs in the past 4 months, jumping from song to song and end up learning none of them.
So I’m in the process of picking 3 of these (which is proving to be very difficult) that I’m going to focus on and put into my practice plan and I will not remove any of them from the practice plan until they have moved into the “Performance” category. I am also going to refrain from playing any other new songs in the meantime and will place songs that peak my interest into a queue that will inform the next song to practice. It’s going to be a challenge.
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6 Replies
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I know exactly what you talking about. I listen to KCBX out of San Luis Obispo a lot in the mornings and there is a 3 hour music show that i listen to pretty much every week day. i have a binder full of songs that I have heard and downloaded from Songsterr.com.
I finally had to limit the learning to a whole week for each song and not allow any of he other songs to interfere with learning that tune. On Friday I heard Going Down the Road feeling Bad by the Dead and have worked on it every day for an hour or two and am adding more every day, but not allowing other songs to interfere with the learning process. Should have my own version down by Wednesday and I’ll Start on another new tune probably on Friday.
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This reply was modified 1 day, 2 hours ago by jorgemac.
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This reply was modified 1 day, 2 hours ago by
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I sometimes think I’m like Scooby Doo and get easily distracted by whatever shiny thing is in front of me. It is a good analogy. I am in process of making a play list of songs by category. I have been trying to come up with a system to refresh old songs and have add new ones for over a year now and not been very successful. This is my latest attempt. Examples of my categories are 1) Love songs 2) Fingerpicking instrumentals 3) Flatpicking instrumentals 4) Traveling songs 5) Old Protest Folk Songs 6) Folks Songs 5) Crying Songs 7) R&B Songs. This plan is very much a work in progress. My intent is to review a category each week. To add new songs, I have to not have more than three working at a time or I end up too diffused to make any progress. Once the song is performance ready or posted, I can put it on the refresher category list. I would solicit any other suggestions to consider for improvement. It is not yet a true Atomic Habit with me.
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@Moose408 I do the same thing, mostly it’s songs from my Spotify playlist that I here and go: “I really like that one, it doesn’t appear to be that hard so let me try. Normally I’ll just fool around with the song for a few hours, put it on my future songs list and it’s not too disruptive to my routine. But I have one that I really like a lot and I’m devoting too much time to it because I want to be able to play and sing it so badly. It’s a bit more advanced for my skills, all fingerstyle and it’s taken me a month to learn the intro, verse and chorus. I still have to memorize the lyrics and get some command of the quite lengthy interlude (or solo).
For the first time I’m really seeing the pitfalls of learning other people’s songs. I avoided this for 2 years almost, waiting patiently for my fingers and brain to acquire some skills. Now I’ve pivoted slightly and moved towards covering songs, and my perfectionism that I worked diligently to suppress is resurfacing because I want to sound like the original.
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OMG, this is a very timely post, and I do this constantly. For me, I don’t know if it’s ADD, or just my lack of patience. Seems like I’m bouncing around from song to song, and never quite finish them. As a matter of fact, I probably only have a dozen or so songs I know all the way through. Some days I sit down and don’t even know what to play. But once I start playing something, I start to get into a groove. I try not to stress about it too much, and keep telling myself I’m doing this for me, and as long as I still keep having fun, I’m OK with it. I still need to find a way to change this pattern though.
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The goal is to get to the point where you don’t have to learn songs anymore, like my son in law who just spent the day with us on the 4th of July, he is able to play just sight reading the chords. (He could probably do it with only the notes in music notation)
We were pulling up songs on our phones and he could play and sing just from the chords and the memory of the song. It’s astounding, he makes it look so easy! He played dozens of songs on my guitar that day, if I practiced one of them all day I wouldn’t be able to play it as well as he played each one. Guitar isn’t even his major instrument – or piano but he’s probably even better on the piano.
He is extremely musical, has a music degree from Moody Bible in Chicago and he majored in voice. He was going to become a professional singer – opera, operetta, musicals but he took a very different path instead. He’s the music director at the Church I have been attending since we moved up here to Jacksonville.
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I’m almost there with songs I’ve heard a lot and with relatively simple chords. I bring them up on Ultimate Guitar and can typically follow along. It helps that that is what we do at my weekly Guitar Jam.
I’ve been trying to get to the point where I can play songs from memory and I have nine currently, but it takes a a lot of effort as a new song mainly because of the lyrics. I’m also reaching the point I’m not sure I can do more from memory. So do I just use a crutch like SongbookPro or Ultimate Guitar and consider that good? I’m not quite there yet.
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