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I enjoy all of Tony’s lessons, but how do you know what to keep as favorites? The technique section is filled with items I need to improve on. I could spend two hours a day just on one new technique, but raley have time to back to them because a new one appears each week, not to mention the new lessons tue – Fri.
I feel like I am getting exposed to really good material, but don’t have time to really get good at it.
How do some of you handle this difficult issue. Would love to hear some ideas.
Hey @Kerby ;
I feel that everyone answered your explicit question, but I don’t feel anyone really addressed the implied question.
So, let me state the implied question: “How do I organize my time to deal with this overwhelming flood of guitar lessons?”
If I could answer that question, then I believe the first question would become pretty obvious, especially with the advice already given in the previous comments.
Tony’s method has to be examined to answer the question. Tony is not trying to give us a series of technique lessons or song lessons, as is the common approach. That approach feels satisfying to someone wanting to learn guitar, but unfortunately, it has been shown to be quite ineffective.
What research shows about learning anything involving muscle memory, is 2 main things: repetition and making mistakes. Oh, and one more very important thing: having fun.
Let’s see how Tony method covers those bases. Every week, the lessons cover 5 basic guitar skills. Monday’s lessons could be said to be the most important as they build the actual fretting and picking skills to play guitar. Yes, they can be “boring”, but we are only talking about doing them for a few minutes. If you do them for a few minutes a day, in a relatively short period of time, your skill improves remarkably. So if we start our practice session throughout the week with Monday’s lesson, by the end of the week we would actually see that particular skill improved.
Tuesday and Thursday are pretty easy to see how they fit into our improvement as musicians and guitarists. But Friday seems to get misunderstood. We already have a “chord progression” day on Thursday. Friday is “chord transitions”. We only want to focus on 2 chords at a time. And we want to go from one to the other very slowly and build our ability to make that particular transition in time at increasing speed using a metronome after we have the basic chord change down. As an example, going from D major to B minor is NOT the same as going from G major to B minor. You may think once you learn B minor it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from, but you’d be very wrong.
Wednesday, we learn scales, which are important to understanding the music theory, but more importantly, it gives us a chance to practice coming up with our own licks instead of learning licks by rote like on Tuesday. We want to play scales “musically”.
Now all of these lessons are challenging so that we will make mistakes. And since we have the “same” lesson every Monday in that it always works on technique but it is a different exercise week to week we get the repetition. And because they are “handed to us on a silver plater”, we don’t have to figure out what to play. These lessons are fun when we spend only a few minutes AND DON’T TRY TO MASTER THEM, ANY OF THEM! That is actually part of the process, DON’T TRY TO MASTER THEM.
These lessons are also fun because they sound musical. Now everyone one of us who “trusted the process” and stopped worrying about how to “keep up” with this overwhelming amount of instruction, found that we improved steadily over time. Yes, learning guitar takes time, but this proved to be the FASTEST way to learn.
It has already been mentioned that the lessons will come around again. If you really like a lesson and want to put in extra work on it other than the 10 minutes the day it was presented, then favorite it. But when you DON’T FAVORITE a lesson, you’ll be blown away when it comes around 8 to 11 months later how much better you can do the lesson without ever having worked on it again. And that’s when you start realizing this works even though it’s counter-intuitive.
Some people stick with the standard skills or song lessons and don’t realize the slow but steady progress over time. And it doesn’t end. We just keep getting better and better. TAC has turned a few of it’s members into professional quality performers. I’m not there yet, but I’m bearing down on it.
I hope this answers your implied question, Kerby.
MG 😀