stuck

[Tricia_Lynn]

What are you stuck on? What are the issues you are having. No one is able to really help or chime in unless we know what the issues are.

I haven’t been a member very long and I am personally loving it so far. There are some days its a challenge but … all in all I am loving it.

[Skyman911]

What is it you’re not enjoying? I can get enjoyment out of every challenge if I let myself. What gets in my way is setting my expectations too high. Are you not enjoying because you’re having difficulty trying to perfect the daily challenges? This is a great learning program.

[petelanger]

Lack of enjoyment probably indicates that the program doesn’t match or meet your expectations. Could you tell us what you were expecting?

[moh]

I was hoping to be playing something that at least sounds like a tune, or music. It just does not sound good at all.

[TommySG1]

Well, there’s a plethora of pretty simple answers I can give you on what you can do however your explanation is pretty vague…

You did mention you wanted to play something that sounds like a ‘tune’ though, There’s thousands of pretty simple melodies to songs to get you going. Tony does some songs right here on some of his daily lessons and if you’re looking for something else like a different genre YouTube’s loaded with them.

[petelanger]

It does take some time to learn enough skill to actually “sound good”. How long? There isn’t a universal answer to that because of too many variables. But most people will probably need somewhere around 2 years, give or take 18 months to adequately integrate some of the most basic guitar skills into your subconscious.

It used to be believed that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, but that is generally not accepted as fully true anymore. For discussion purposes, let’s just assume thee is some truth in that estimate. If you devoted 40 hours a week then it would take 5 years to accumulate 10,000 hours. Members on TAC report they spend 15 minutes to maybe 180 minutes per day but I have not heard of anyone claiming to play guitar for anywhere near 40 hours per week. I know a professional guitar player and he isn’t close to 40 hours.

The point is that even if it takes 1/5 of 10k hours to acquire “mastery”, it still would be quite a large of number of 15-180 minute sessions.

Instead of fixating on wanting to “sound musical”, try to direct your attention to incremental improvement by measuring periodically. That’s why we have the benchmark weeks where you are encouraged to record yourself and compare your playing to what it used to be. Personally I look for something to take away from every daily challenge, something that went better than expected or some nugget that I learned in the current session. It’s important to identify it and write it down. When you write it down you might also post it here on TAC as this lifts others up as well as yourself!

[LMM]

Hi MOH

If you have completed Tony’s 30-day challenge, then you are most definitely in the position to learn and play a song. It will just take extracurricular activity, on your part, in addition to continuing Tony’s challenges.

There are many three-chord beginner songs to choose from.

What music genre do you like?

For example, Bob Dylan’s earlier music from the 70’s is acoustic and often just three basic chords. The same is true for many other genres of music.

Do a Google search and find that perfect song to start! Just keep in mind, you will still have to practice the song regularly to get ‘showtime’ ready.

Tony’s 30-day gave you all the tools you need to learn and play songs. Tony’s ongoing challenges introduce you to new concepts to then improve your playing ability. That is something to be very excited about!

For example, I am learning to play ‘House of The Rising Sun’ by the Animals. Each day I spend a minimum of 10 minutes practicing the chord progressions so I can change chords smoothly enough to begin adding finger picking with the chords. My goal is to learn half a dozen songs to strum by the campfire this coming summer.

Tony’s challenges keep me learning innovative approaches and fretboard skills. This in turn will help me play better overall and expand my playing ability.

I hope this helps. Happy playing.

[Kathleen D]

I don’t understand any of the terms in a challenge and can’t always figure out where his fingers are. I stepped away for a month to find and learn a basic strumming pattern from

A free lesson online. I’m

Confused why I need to use outside sources cause I can’t do the challenges. Is there some place I can find a list of definitions to at least help me understand what he’s talking about?

[JohnWP]

Come to this forum with your questions if you have a problem with a daily challenge. Lot of great people willing to help

I remember my first months with TAC I spent more time trying to figure out which finger Tony was using for each note than I did playing the actual challenge. Eventually I realized that unless he specifically suggested which fingers to use then it didn’t really matter as long as it felt comfortable for me.

Guitar playing is not easy but if you stick with it you will make progress. TAC is just one tool in the toolbox and finding other sources of information and inspiration is not a bad thing at all.

I just signed up for my second year of TAC this week and I am amazed at how far I have come and still know how far I have go. But it’s the journey that makes it all worthwhile.

[jumpinjeff]

Hi Kathleen, I do like the idea of posting questions/observations in the Forum. I like even better posting a question in the response area for Daily Challenges. It is where I would get the fastest redirect. I looked outside of TAC for info because I was impatient. Everything I needed was here but I needed to see it differently as well to penetrate my skull…on the thicker side! I don’t know if I sped up my process or maybe even slowed down the progress I was seeking but gained on the intellectual side of music. Tony sneaks all that stuff in without detection but as you do more and your pattern recognition kicks in you will begin to recognize it. At first you see it but don’t know what you are looking at…lessons go by (this was a frustrating time for me but I was not being duped or fooled I was being primed, set up for success if you will, hampered mostly by my expectation getting in the way of my fun in the form of frustration), you gain experience and then when a lesson returns you begin to see things you did not see before. It is my perfect learning model. Maybe for you too if you look at it a little differently.

[petelanger]

In the skill courses section there is a section called “Strumming Jumpstart”. I think it covers most strumming patterns. Using outside resources isn’t a bad idea, my YouTube feed is loaded with options. Plus I had joined several guitar programs before TAC and I still occasionally will pull up info from them as well.

Don’t think that you have to complete the entire daily challenge. Just do what you can and mark complete! When I started I had to just focus on a measure or 2 from Monday and Tuesday’s challenges. Maybe learn a scale and then repeat on Thurs and Friday because I couldn’t do the rhythm and chord transitions at all at the end of the week. But as time progressed I was able to move further and then when those songs came back around I could go further into the week.
But I guess TAC isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. But please note that a number of TAC members left the program and then came back. I wish I remembered their stories but the gist of it was they didn’t recognize the value until they were away from it for a while.

[moh]

thx

[moh]

I don’t like to practice. I can’t get my fingers in the right place and I hear a thud. I can’t make transitions from one chord to the next very fast and am ready to play some tunes and that hasn’t happened yet in the course.

[jumpinjeff]

Why do you play guitar Moh? In getting to the bottom of that, we may get to why you don’t like guitar practice. Logically, I would say that practice delivers you from the buzz and thuds you don’t like. But art is not always logical. I remember when I first started learing here I would get super frustrated that I could not play like Tony or even remotely resembling what Tony demonstrated. It was not until I realized Tony had been through his own learning process twenty years prior and had been playing for 20+ years. Once I appreciated his learning effort and result I respected my own effort and became comfortable with the learning part of being a practitioner of guitar playing.

[petelanger]

Tony says, we don’t practice but play! Think of it as playing, to play is fun! Practice is work, we don’t work in TAC!

[moh]

no I can’t get my fingers in the right place and hear a thud. my transitions to different chords are not in rhythm and awkward too.

[petelanger]

Been playing for a year, I too still hear thuds sometimes.

[moh]

I thought I would be playing some simple tunes at least by now.

[petelanger]

You need to REFRAME!

So you have recognized that you are dissatisfied because your expectations about your progress are not being met.

There are a few things wrong with that:
How would you know how long it should take to progress according to your own standard? You have never learned guitar before so you can only compare it to other skills. Most of those, like touch typing, surfing, driving, sewing, knitting are not nearly as complex as playing guitar. They can be learned in a shorter time because there are only a few components to learning them. Guitar is different, hundreds of little movements in the hands required to get it right. This overloads your brain quickly. Progress will be slow in the beginning, but it picks up and surprisingly it will happen without you realizing it. You struggle and struggle and then suddenly at some point when you aren’t expecting it, you can play that chord, mimic that rhythm, hit the right string without looking, or remember those notes!

The next is not everybody learns how to play guitar at the same pace. I am sure that my progress is at the low end of the spectrum. I’ve been playing for a year but still would not perform for anyone but myself. I have moments where I sound pretty good, those last about 3 seconds, lol! Maybe 10 -15 seconds if it’s an easy lick. But I am so much better than I was a year ago

Change your perspective, you have to reframe what a successful session is. Take something away from each time you are involved with a daily challenge or a skill course! Any small thing will do. Maybe you understood clearly what Tony was doing and mentally you had it, but your fingers can’t quite do it yet. Maybe you did a section a bit better than yesterday or last time. Maybe you showed up and gave it your best.

I find it isn’t hard to pick a win every time I play guitar. You have heard the old saying: “How do you eat and elephant? One bite at a time. Becoming a proficient guitar player is a good sized elephant! Take small a enough bite so your brain isn’t overloaded. Tony sets this up for you. He doesn’t ask you to sit down and play Alice’s Restaurant. He has you do challenges that take 5 – 15 seconds. Then at times he’ll ask you to try to piece 2 or more of those together, but it’s still a win if you can do them individually.

Try very hard to not focus on what you can’t do yet. Reframe your thinking, uncover what you have been blind to, and notice what you can do now!