By Nicholas Anderson
Whether a beginner or virtuoso, everyone wants to make progress in their guitar playing. Everyone wants to get better, play faster, cleaner, or more creatively. Sadly, few people have a systematic way to achieve what they want. This is true not only in guitar playing, but in most areas of life. But there is a very simple way to change that.
Set goals.
Setting goals may be the single most important thing you do that will transform your playing. Without clear, specific and attainable goals, you won’t be able to see the path to success. Your practice sessions will be random, haphazard, unfocused, and ineffective. Setting goals puts a specific target in front of you that you can them aim for and work toward.
Think very carefully about what kind of goals you want to set for yourself. Do you want to be a great rhythm guitarist? A virtuoso lead guitarist? A technically perfect classical guitarist? Let’s say you want to be a virtuoso lead guitarist. That is not a goal. At least, it is not a very good goal. I’m not saying there is anything inherently wrong per se, it just isn’t a specific goal. That might sound completely wrong, but you’ll see what I mean in a moment.
When you say you want to be X, you need to describe everything that you need to do in order to become X. Those are your goals. Let’s apply that to being a virtuoso lead guitarist. Get out a sheet of paper and a pencil and write down everything you can think of that you’ll need to do in order to become a virtuoso lead guitarist. Here’s a start:
- All major and minor diatonic scales
- All pentatonic scales
- A thorough understanding of music theory
- Sweep picking
- Arpeggios
- Aural skills
- A good understanding of musical styles
- An understanding of song structure
That’s an incomplete list, but you get the idea. Next, take one of those topics and break it down further, like this:
All pentatonic scales
- Individual patterns of the scale
- Where patterns fit within each key
- Common uses of each pattern
- “Standard” licks
- Ability to visualize each pattern on the fret board
- Ability to easily play all patterns in every key
Next, take one of the sub topics and see if you can distill it even further, for instance, you can break down the topic of individual patters of the scale into just one of the scale positions you need to memorize.
Until you break down your big, overarching goal into smaller, attainable goals, you’re probably going to take a lot longer to get to where you want to be, or more likely, you’ll give up in frustration. By setting goals and achieving them, you can look back on all that you’ve accomplished and see the massive progress you’re making, and that will motivate you to keep pressing forward.
What goals have you set for your guitar playing? Are you ready to reach those goals? Apply for admission today