Why Making ‘Fast Progress’ On Guitar Leads Many Guitarists To Failure

Why Making ‘Fast Progress’ On Guitar Leads Many Guitarists To Failure

By Tom Hess

If you are similar to most guitar players, you are under the impression that becoming great requires progressing as quickly as possible. Fact is, this belief can potentially keep you from achieving your guitar playing goals in a short amount of time. Most of the time, guitarists damage their ability to grow as players when they unknowingly make progress ‘too quickly’ in some areas of their playing and ‘not at all’ in others. This is a perfect example of ‘not properly controlling progress’. This common mistake leads many guitarists to frustration when they are unable to play guitar how they want because they do not possess the tools (that they thought they were developing) needed to reach their musical goals.

Why Too Much Progress In Your Guitar Playing Can Be Destructive:

When you make too much progress too quickly, you are at great risk of becoming ‘unbalanced’ as a guitarist. I see this all the time – guitar players come to me frustrated because they have developed great ‘technical’ guitar skills, yet lack the ability to translate what they can play into actual ‘music’. The reason this occurs is because the player developed their technical skills and speed much faster than they are able to ‘think’ about the notes they are playing. As a result, they never mastered the ability to express themselves with what they learned. When you advance your guitar skills in this manner, your playing becomes ‘out of balance’ and your weaker areas end up preventing you from using your musical strengths expressively.

Why does this happen? After teaching guitar for 25 years, I have pinpointed the exact reasons. Here they are:

Reason One: Guitar players falsely believe that they need to fully master certain skills before they practice other areas. This causes them to consistently practice in only one area of their playing while ignoring others. This is a very common occurrence that I’ve seen countless times in the hundreds of students I’ve had over the years. Here are two of the most common examples of this:

Example One: Guitarists use up every moment of their practice schedule to focus on increasing speed/building technique and learning about music theory, trying to master these things before they begin integrating them into their improvisation and songwriting. These players may increase their ability to play with good technique and understand concepts in music theory, but they will remain a novice when it comes to applying their skills in any kind of self-expressive manner. Truth is, improvising requires practice of a very specific set of skills at the same time that you work to improve your general guitar playing. There is almost nothing more disappointing than having to start from square one after spending countless hours building your skills in a totally unbalanced manner.

Example Two: Many guitarists who want to become great improvisers attempt to memorize the entire fretboard before working on their improvising skills. They spend many months working to memorize each note for each fret as quickly as possible before finally working to become better at improvisation. As a result, they are surprised when the time comes to improvise and their ability to recall individual note names on the fretboard is completely useless because they never learned how to integrate this knowledge with the understanding of how each note feels while being played over specific chords. Again this mismanagement and out of control progress leads guitar players away from the goals they intended to reach.

To find out more about why the above approaches are ineffective, check out this free video about how to improve your guitar practice effectiveness.

Reason Two: In some cases, guitar players seem to ‘naturally’ make progress faster with specific guitar skills while struggling to improve in other areas of their playing. This situation occurs because the practicing approaches in their weaker areas are nowhere near as effective as the ones they use with their strengths. This commonly happens with guitarists who learn guitar on their own OR with people who take lessons with guitar teachers who have not helped tons of other guitarists reach their goals.

How Can This Be Solved?

Before I reveal what needs to get done in order to bypass the issues mentioned above, there are two errors you must avoid:

1. ‘Distributing practice time equally for all areas of your playing’: After reading about the above problems, you might be thinking that the best approach to guitar practice is practicing all your skills for an equal amount of time. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE! Truth is, your guitar playing skills to not grow in the same manner at the same rate. With this in mind, it makes no sense to reserve the same amount of practice time for all areas of your playing because this will only lead you back to the problem of becoming ‘unbalanced’.

2. ‘Practicing anything you can think of in order to be free of weaknesses’: Don’t believe that in order to ‘not have any weak areas’ as a guitarist you need to practice everything you can think of. Believe it or not, ALL of your guitar heroes have major weaknesses in areas outside of their desired playing style. However, they are masters in the areas that matter most to them. For example, Yngwie Malmsteen does not excel in playing jazz fusion, Steve Vai is not a master in the bluegrass style, etc. These players all realize that these skills are irrelevant to their major musical goals and understand that it is not important to waste their time developing them. Only the most relevant weaknesses are the ones that you should improve in order to reach your musical goals. Other weaknesses can and should be avoided.

To ensure that you don’t have issues with mismanaged guitar playing progress, follow these 5 steps:

1. Read the tips on this page about how to reach musical goals to learn what you should be working on right now in your playing.

2. Find out how to build a guitar practice routine that effectively allocates the right amount of time to each practice item you need to work on. Then take action to use your routine and make steady progress to become the player you want to be. Learn how to create the best guitar practicing schedules after testing your current ability to make effective practice routines.

3. Don’t fall for the trap of only practicing what you are good at while not practicing in areas where you are weak. Your (‘relevant’) weaknesses will always hold you back from achieving your ultimate goals – you must fix them first before you can fully use your musical strengths.

4. Don’t make false assumptions about which guitar skills need to be improved before moving onto other areas in your playing. Watch this guitar practice effectiveness video to get more insight about how to evenly develop your guitar skills.

5. Locate a great guitar teacher who has already helped other guitarists reach their highest goals and understands how to help you reach yours by providing you with many effective strategies. Learn who you should work with to reach your musical goals by downloading this free resource about how to find a guitar teacher fast.

After completing the five steps above, you will avoid the common issue of developing into an unbalanced guitar player and start heading down the right path toward reaching your greatest musical goals in very little time.