[petelanger]

@gmhendersonme-com

I haven’t hit the doldrums, Gary but I have run into some patches of less excitement. I was so raw when I started here that the level of teaching has been quite challenging through my first 2 years, and it looks like that will continue for a while. I wasn’t skilled or gifted and it’s still going slow. I have supplemented TAC with some books on music theory, another music program that had the word academy in it’s name and I’m learning luthier skills on the side, doing my own setups.

I gravitate back to TAC though, this thing has way more magnetism than the other shiny objects out there. If you’re not being drawn to it then I’m not sure what that means.

When I first started I had a long list of songs I wanted to learn and it was my goal to be able to play them as soon as possible. But I soon realized that my skills were totally inadequate to play most of them and I began rearrange my short term goals to learning the basics for as long as necessary, so that down the road I could learn songs at 10 times the pace I was able to do in the early going.

I do rehearse a few songs and I’m keeping a list of the ones I want to play eventually but my desire to learn songs and develop a playlist has waned greatly. I would say I devote less than 20% of my time to learning, rehearsing songs. I’m much more focused on overall command of the instrument. But each person’s journey is unique and your path may look completely different from mine.

Music is a language and as students of guitar we are learning one of music’s dialects. Songs are how we get exposed to music, and they reflect an individual’s (or small group of people’s) expression of ideas using the language of music. When we enjoy a particular song we want to mimic it and that by itself is absolutely a desirable goal, as long as it continues to reveal the (musical!) vocabulary and grammar to us as players. I don’t want to let the pursuit of learning a particular song become a detriment to learning the language that the instrument speaks.

• This reply was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by  petelanger.