Why do so many people go wrong, right from the beginning of learning the guitar?

There are two reasons people fail or have unnecessary difficulty in learning the guitar.

#1

They are not given the right information necessary to begin to practice correctly, and effectively

#2

They are not taught a practice approach that always brings results, no matter whether you are a beginner or an advanced player trying to get to the next level.

 

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It is really very simple. And I am going to explain it to you very simply.

When a person feels the desire to play the guitar, to make those wonderful sounds he has heard and fallen in love with, it is a beautiful thing. And when he or she responds to that feeling, and finally gets a guitar, finally takes that first lesson, or starts teaching themselves, that is also a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately, it often turns into a not so beautiful thing! For many people, it turns into a growing frustration, sometimes a nightmare. These are the people who end up quitting because they think the reason they are having trouble is lack of talent. It isn't. 

For others, it goes pretty well, but along the way, they start running into problems; problems that nobody seems to be able to help them with. They see other people do nice things on the guitar, but they don't seem to be able to  learn how  to do it themselves.

This is because, whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not, playing the guitar is first and foremost, a physical activity. You need the co-operation of certain parts of your physical body to do it.

And your body follows certain laws in the way it functions. Break those laws, and you are in trouble. Be ignorant of those laws, and you will have a difficult time. Now, you may be one of the lucky people, the ones we say have "natural talent", and you may naturally follow some of those laws, some of the time.  But you will not learn as fast and as well as if you knew all the laws right from the beginning! And because of the things you don't know, you will be building bad habits, that you will have to work hard to undo later.

In fact, the best you can probably hope for is that you will be like me; you have  a lot of natural talent, and you pick it up quite fast. You do pretty well beginning to teach yourself, and then you get a teacher, and you learn quite fast in your lessons also. You practice many hours a day because you want it so badly, and many people tell you that you are really good!

But as you go along, you notice that there are many things you want to do on the guitar that you see other people do. And you are having problems doing them. You can't seem to play as fast as that guy, you fall apart trying to do what they are doing.

If you are like me, and so many hundreds of the people I have taught over the years, there are some extremely important things that you won't know! You won't know that right from the beginning of playing , right from the beginning of touching the guitar for the first time, you were breaking certain laws about how the human body works, and how it learns to have the fine motor control that is required to play an instrument, especially one as complex as the guitar.

You won't know that because you unknowingly broke those laws, you set up certain conditions in the body and the mind, that will limit your ability to play the guitar, and to make continuous progress in learning to play the guitar.

And if you are like me, you will feel like you would give anything to know what went wrong, and what to do about it. The good news is that here you are reading this, so you won't have to go through what I went through. You won't have to say what John Berg of Arizona said, reading "The Principles of Correct Practice" after 4 years of lessons: I learned more in five minutes than I have in 4 years, doing the same mistakes over and over again. It should be required reading by anyone who really wants to play well!

I want to share with you what I have learned; what I wish someone could have told me right from the beginning, the things you better know before you begin to learn the guitar.........

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