I often get questions from my beginning students that fall into the category of asking for tips to help with certain techniques, like how to properly play barre chords, or how to switch chords quickly, or how to do a proper vibrato, or how to bend a string accurately. All of those are excellent questions and there are some great tips out there on how to achieve those techniques. But often the question is accompanied by a comment on how the student has been practicing this technique for a week or a month or even 2 months, and it isn’t getting any better.
To which my response usually is: (comedic pause) “But you’ve only been practicing it for 2 months.”
What I mean by that is, many of these techniques require a lot of time and practice to start doing well, and sometimes they take much more time to master than many beginners think. I often compare learning the guitar to learning how to ride a bike, but where that comparison breaks down is that learning to ride a bike is magnitudes easier and faster than learning to play the guitar. To ride a bike, you only need to master one single technique, which is possible in just a day or two for many people. To play guitar well, you have to master dozens or hundreds of techniques and little micro-techniques that you’re not even aware of. Learning an instrument is an incredibly complicated process, that demands the muscles of your hands and fingers perform complex movements that they don’t perform in any other aspect of your life. Rather than learning to ride a bike, it’s more akin to learning how to speak, and you know how long that took you to learn to do well, right?
Years. Years and years.
Now, we teachers don’t usually tell students this dirty little secret, because it could be discouraging to hear that it can take as long as years to learn certain things. But don’t let that discourage you, just let it help you set realistic expectations, and one of those expectations should be that some of these techniques take a lot longer than a week, a month, or even 2 months to learn and master. For comparison, I mastered all of the above techniques a long time ago, and I remember roughly how long it took me for each one, practicing 2-3 hours a day as a beginner during my high school years:
- Open chords: 1 year
- Barre chords: 2 years
- Switch chords quickly and accurately: 2-3 years
- Good, quick string bends: 3-4 years
- Vibrato: 5 years
That last one just about killed me. Vibrato didn’t come naturally to me AT ALL. I literally thought it was just impossible for me, for the longest time. I thought my hand just plain couldn’t do it. I felt dejected by it, I loved other player’s vibratos so much and I was so frustrated that I couldn’t emulate that. Now it’s one of my best features, I can pull off any kind of vibrato I want to at will, and I have complete control over it. I love my vibrato and I’m proud of it. And all it took was practice, a lot more practice than I thought it would take, but that’s all it was in the end. (It happened all at once, too. One minute I couldn’t do it, and the very next minute I could. I was overjoyed. My brain just needed that long to build up the muscle memory for it.)
The point is, a great deal of guitar playing takes a fair amount of time to learn to do well. Be patient, and know that it’s worth the time and effort in the end. Keep practicing and have faith. In “The Empire Strikes Back”, Luke was impatient and just wanted to get to the cool part of being a heroic Jedi without putting in all the work and training. Yoda viewed this with contempt. “All his life has he looked away…to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph!” Yoda is right. Don’t look to the future – focus on the here and now. Practice, and you will reap future rewards. Rush the process, and you will end up putting in more work than necessary, and arrive at your destination later. Trust the process, and be prepared to spend months or years working on your favorite techniques. Not too many famous musicians got there after only playing for a year or two. You can do it, just take things one step at a time and practice patience. “Control, control! You must learn control!”
Now, go forth and conquer playing the guitar with a solid practice schedule and all the patience you can muster!