Moving on too soon.

[albert_d]

Welcome to TAC. I too joined TAC as I began to anticipate retirement. It has been a rewarding move. Many of us have to set aside notions of perfection and comparison thinking and instead learn the joy of progress. The challenges come around again and the skill courses are always there for review. The challenges come around again and you will be pleased at how you have progressed without realizing it. But in the meantime one has to relax and let go of the idea of mastering. Your brain and muscle memory are quietly at work building on each days 10 minutes. So while it feels you are moving on too soon, understand you will return fortified. Have fun with it and accumulate small wins.

[DZRShodan]

Kind words and wise advise. Thanks for the input, I very much appreciate it!

[petelanger]

@DZRShodan
It’s absolutely okay to move on before you “feel ready”! And when you do you will most likely hit a wall. Don’t worry, crawl up to wall and soak in all you can in front of it! After a few new challenges that wall will start to move and you’ll be advancing. Then as you begin repeating benchmarks (every 4 months) and are able to directly measure your growth you will see how cyclical TAC is. There is no need to worry about what you can’t do, that will be there next week or month (or whenever), be excited what you learned this week!

[DZRShodan]

Thanks for the information. I guess I missed that the benchmarks repeat. I’ll hang in there and try and trust the system.

[jorgemac]

First, this has developed into a guitar learning community that does share all of it guitar issues with each other a learn from our fellow TAC members trials and challenges of learning to play guitar.

This method of learning teaches you how to learn to play guitar through slowly learning how to play a bunch of cool songs. Every day of practice will help develop a certain guitar centric skill. Yes, you will learn the basic’s of songs and the style of guitar playing needed to master that song. You are not expected to master that song in a week, but learn some basic guitar skills that will help you develop into a more rounded player. All of us struggle together every week and share our small wins and areas we are having trouble learning. we try to help each other over those humps blocking our guitar learning journey. Then you will revisit that song in a few months and will be surprised how much you have grown as a guitar player.

When I, now, play songs that I tried to learn and play before joining with this community of guitar students all of those songs now flow effortlessly through my fingers with the skills I’ve learned in the short 9 1/2 months I have been a TACer For me this method of learning works.

welcome aboard the TAC guitar train.

[DZRShodan]

I’m new to TAC and am beginning to appreciate that there is a community of fellow guitar players who are there to encourage me and help me stay focused. I can only hope to one day be able to feel the songs flow “effortlessly” through MY fingers.

[martyepp]

D,
I’ve been at this for 13 days now. I’m stuck on playing a clean “C” chord. I still go back to the Blues section, since I haven’t come close to playing that well. My personal opinion is that you should go at your own pace and do what feels right to you. This isn’t a sprint. If it takes me 60 days to play what others do in 30, so be it.

[petelanger]

@martyepp that’s up to you if you want to hold yourself back for 30 days. I’ll tell you my C, D, E-, F, G and B chords were not clean when I started the challenges. The first challenge I went into was Landslide (Stevie Nicks) and Travis picking based on C and G chords. It challenged me, but I grasped the finger picking and my chords got a little better. 2 Weeks later it was Old Man – now that was so over my head when we hit Thursday. But I did the best I could, when the chords were not doable I went back to Mondays and Tuesdays lessons and replayed those on Thursday and Friday. You struggle, you learn a bit.
Then 4 months later Old Man comes back around and you know what, the chord changes are still tough but I’m doing one here and one there.

These challenges are structured so that no matter where you are at skill wise, you can learn a lot. You learn so much not even realizing that you’re learning it!

It’s fine to hold yourself back, but if you make a habit out of not challenging yourself you’re going to advance slower than if you had just dove in head first.

[petelanger]

Oh and I just wanted to reply to not achieving a clean C chord in 13 days:

Getting clean chords is a tough get and the time it takes is going to vary from person to person. Children will learn much faster
but adults like me for example:

C 6 months

D 3 months

D- 3 months

E 4 months

E- 1 months

F mini 15 months

F barre 12 months

G 5 months

B7 5 months

These are approximations and I am not talking about spending 3 seconds to form the chord and then strum, that’s not how we play guitar. This represents the (concurrent=learning simultaneously and not in succession) time when I could transition into the chord within half a second and get a clear sound (no thud) at least 75% of the time. I still miss today, nearly 2 years in from when I started playing, but less and less nowadays.

I left out the A chord it took me quite a while to do the 3 finger A chord, about 2 months. I usually barre it now.

The A- is very close to the E chord, but I got it down quicker. The E seemed good, didn’t even realize that I was muting the D string.

• This reply was modified 2 months ago by  petelanger.

[DZRShodan]

I remember when I was first learning the basic cords and how long it took me to get them down. I’m rusty and getting my fingers to remember what they knew so long ago. Keep up the good work and I’ll keep working on my end and, hopefully, we will both be jamming out soon!

[Moose408]

The motto here at TAC is progress over perfection.

In the beginning many of the challenges are going to be well challenging. You are not expected to perfect them before moving on. You are expected to try them for 10 mins, do the best you can and then move on. The first time through you might only be able to do the first line or perhaps on the first measure. That’s OK. The challenges come around again and the next time you will get a little further. I’m on 9th time through on the Ain’t no Sunshine benchmark and this was the first time I could get through the whole thing, although still not perfect. The first time through I could only do the first line.

It goes against our nature to move in before perfecting the exercise but that it how it is designed. And it gets results if you trust the system.

[DZRShodan]

Moose,

Thanks for the insights into how this works. I didn’t know about the challenges returning. That makes sense that by repeating the challenges, we should be able to improve little by little (especially in my case). It’s encouraging to me that you have been at this for two years and have seen success using the TAC system. I’ll keep with it and just have to accept that where I am in the process is sufficient.

[Brad C]

I’m new to the program, just over a month. At what point do most folks mark the challenge as complete? Some challenges are more familiar, easier to play, and I feel I can honestly mark it as complete, but others are much more challenging and take more time to master, I feel I need to move on to the next day’s challenge. What’s the general feeling as to when to mark the challenge complete?

[gmhendersonme-com]

Hey… mark it complete once you’ve spent at least 10 minutes on it ! You don’t need to perfect it. I do the challenge in the morning and spend enough time on it to go through the whole challenge…usually 10-20 minutes. I mark it complete and then pick up the guitar a couple of times a day later on. It gets better with each time, but there’s no way I’m perfecting the skills first time through … it’ll probably take a few months, I figure. But I do try to incorporate the things I’ve learned into some songs that I know. It’s usually a butcher job at first, but I don’t mind. In my mind, it’s progress.

[petelanger]

In the daily challenges throughout the year Tony addresses this concept of completing the challenge. Of course he isn’t going to talk about it every single day, but if you show up regularly you will hear it preached: perfection is not required! Spend your 10 – 20 minutes and mark it complete!

If it had to be perfect I would not have very many completes throughout the year, if any!