4 myths holding back self-taught guitarists from making progress.
If everyone says the same thing, it must be true, right?
Photo by Sonu Agvan on Unsplash
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A lot of online guitar education is very similar. And if everyone says the same thing, it must be true, right?
Not necessarily. There are a lot of myths out there about how to learn guitar. Sometimes I come across stuff I really don't agree with and wonder how someone trying to teach themselves guitar online (without a deep background in music) can make any progress. These poor people get overwhelmed and find themselves lacking direction because these concepts that are supposed to work for everyone don't seem to work for them.
Content creators do their best, but they are limited by prerecorded videos and teaching something as individual as guitar to a mass audience with almost no interaction. These limitations end up stifling useful teaching options and, as a result, certain myths get taken as law and end up propagating through the culture.
Before I get to the myths, here are some patterns in the online guitar education culture that propagate them:
There are things online guitar education mostly provides to people teaching themselves guitar:
Technique how-tos
How to play the raw materials of music (scales and chords, for example)
How to play [X] song
A general sequence of learning steps (in a full course)
Content creators usually focus on how to play guitar - they hope someone coming across the information can learn it themselves and use it to improve their playing.
The issue is this: anyone coming across this information for the first time and finding it useful (especially in beginner or intermediate stages) will have a hard time connecting these pieces meaningfully together. Some instructors emphasize certain concepts while other instructors say to forget about them. Some instructors say to play the technique like this while others say to play it like that.
The student is left trying to figure out what's actually important, useful, and worthwhile.
There are things online guitar education can provide, but usually doesn't:
Frameworks and strategies (to learn new information in a systematic way)
Principles (to fall back on when you've reached a point of confusion)
Fundamentals (a strong foundation to place and organize all the random lessons out there)
Learning how to learn (ideas in pedagogy to teach yourself the instrument effectively)
How to stay motivated (creating a daily playing habit or finding a community to play in)
People trying to teach themselves guitar online aren't experts in music. They don't just need to know how to do something, they need to know why as well.
When these types of things are mentioned, it's usually in passing. Despite being the most important background concepts for someone teaching themselves guitar online, they often come as an afterthought to the how-tos.
It makes sense, too.
Content creators either give the people what they want by producing more of what the algorithm says is working, or they just make something they think is most important without testing the idea with the people. Either way, these important concepts often get ignored.
The people almost always want the quick, easy "how-to" instead of the more complicated (yet beneficial) "but why?" More content creators need to convince self-teaching guitarists the value of these background concepts.
There are things online guitar education can't provide:
Feedback
Accountability
Help with specific problems
Individual wants and needs
Where to go next
Online courses and lessons usually aren't live sessions - they are prerecorded videos or written articles.
You don't get the benefit of one-on-one instruction to make sure you're playing the thing right or understanding it correctly. You don't get the accountability of either a teacher or community to keep you moving toward your goals.
To include these important aspects of learning guitar, the whole online guitar education system would need to be rethought.
Given these limitations and parameters, what we're left with is what we've got.
And as a result, here are 4 particularly shitty myths that can misguide people trying to teach themselves guitar online and ruin their overall playing experience.
Myth #1: There’s a finish line I must reach and to get there, I must do [X], [Y], and [Z].
This myth leads to all kinds of problems.
You might find you’re lacking a direction, stuck in a learning phase where you feel like you’re not a guitar player yet (but maybe one day), or always feeling like there’s still such a long way to go. These issues slowly chip away at your motivation and desire to learn.
If you’re striving for something because everyone seems to think it’s important and you don’t know why, you’re in a losing battle.
In your guitar practice, there are specific goals and general goals. They need to be aligned.
Your specific goals are the actual musical concepts and techniques you learn.
For example, you might think you need to play [X] song, [X] fingerpicking pattern, [X] strumming pattern, or solo with the pentatonic scale. Or maybe your teacher said you need to work on this. Or the YouTube video said this is what you need to learn.
To illustrate, here are some sample titles from popular YouTube videos:
Top 5 Things Every Intermediate Guitar Player Should Know
14 Essential Guitar Books
10 Things Every Guitarist Should Know
Top 5 Things Every Beginner Guitar Player Should Learn
The pressure is on. Everyone says these should be your goals. You don't want to be the one human person on planet Earth who doesn't know the thing.
Your general goal is your North Star.
The North Star stays in a constant position in the sky while every other star appears to revolve around it. Once you find it in the sky, you can navigate in any direction knowing you will continue the right way.
As a guitarist, if you have a clear idea of your North Star you can answer questions like these:
What kind of guitarist do you want to be?
Do you want to entertain? Do you want a creative outlet?
Do you want to write music?
Do all your friends play a certain kind of music you don’t?
Do you care less about music as an art but like the theory and math-y side of it?
These are all valid reasons to play guitar. In fact, there are no invalid reasons to play guitar.
To find your North Star, you might follow the advice of the experienced. But their advice might not help you move toward your North Star, and that’s the problem.
The guitar starts to feel like something to conquer when your specific goals don’t match your general goals.
So how do you know when you’re a successful guitarist? How do you find the finish line?
There is no finish line.
Of his songwriting, Paul Simon once said his job is to wake up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other. After decades of creating some of the greatest songs ever written, he still hasn’t “arrived.” Is Paul Simon not a successful songwriter? Is he paralyzed by a lack of direction? No.
His North Star is exploring different sounds, textures, and lyrical ideas, and his specific goals constantly lead him there.
The better you can define your North Star, the better you can choose the best specific goals to move you there. The more aligned your specific goals are with your North Star, the more learning guitar becomes an enjoyable act in any state of playing or practice at any level.
As long as your specific goals are always aligned with your North Star, every single thing you learn or practice is one step forward on the right path. Not only does your playing move in the right direction, it shoots off like a rocket. Your intrinsic motivation stays high. Creating a daily habit becomes easier. Every little concept or technique you learn helps your skills compound instead of boom and bust.
In other words, you progress more easily with less effort.
Myth #2: I need a practice schedule to improve.
Having a set practice schedule isn’t always helpful. In fact, sometimes it’s a waste of time.
Let's say you’ve found some resources from different websites or YouTube videos that promise improvement if you start doing [X] practice routine. So you decide how you’re going to attack all this information and design a schedule for yourself. The hope is by doing [X] finger exercise for [X] minutes and [Y] picking pattern for [Y] minutes, you will become better.
You go through your practice schedule over the next few weeks and get better at those things, but it's not exactly clear how this helps your overall guitar playing experience.
There are two things wrong here:
You might not be designing and updating your routine that well
The exercises may not match your goals
A lot of the success with a practice routine comes down to personality.
There are two types of people: those who enjoy organizing, categorizing, or making lists, and those who don't.
Making a practice schedule is easy for the organized among us, but it doesn’t guarantee results. It relies on the prudence of the person making it. And even if you feel like you have a great routine, it's common to feel like you didn’t make any progress. Without being specific about what you’re going to practice, you’ll end up noodling, which could be fun, but not useful if your goal is to improve.
If you decide to work with a practice routine, avoid these 3 common mistakes:
Creating a practice routine once and never changing it.
A routine is great, but the risk is that it becomes just that - too routine.
It’s no use to have the same old series of events over and over again week after week. You need to make micro adjustments as your playing changes.
One way to do this is to be more specific in the topics you want to work on. Instead of having a section called "Scales," change the focus each week. This week go for “D Major Scale”. Next week go for “G Minor Scale”. The more narrow the scope, the more completely you can master that specific thing.
“Did I learn anything about the D Major scale this week?” is much easier to answer than “Did I learn anything about scales this week?” Even better: "Did I learn something about the D Major Scale and use it in one of the projects I'm working on?"
Not keeping track of progress.
A practice routine is only useful if you know you’re getting from point A to point B. You only know if that is happening by keeping track.
While working on the D Major scale this week, did you make note of how fast you could play it? What areas of the neck spoke to you the most? What songs use the scale? What problems did you have? Which part of the scale was easy? Which parts were harder?
Lots of reflection questions not only help you know where you left off for the next time you come back to this concept, but they help what you’ve worked on literally stick in your brain. You’ll take away more from the practice routine by reflecting on what you’ve done.
Not being consistent
Slogging through your program once a week probably isn’t enough to constitute a routine. That might be more of a “check-in.”
Staying consistent is easiest when everything is set up ahead of time. Planning what you will do ahead of time is important to bring down the barrier to entry. At the start of the week, spend 10 minutes deciding what topics and concepts will be in your practice routine for the next few days. Get the resources together and have everything ready to go.
Make all the decisions at the beginning so when it’s time to sit down every other day, you can just get right into it without too much distraction and messing around.
If you're not the type to like organizing and making lists, you can still improve without a practice routine.
I'm in this category. Instead of a practice routine, I deal in practice episodes.
There are a few reasons I never block off a chunks of time to practice my guitar. Firstly, it seems like a chore and I'm not that disciplined. Secondly, I would rather do anything else in the world than drill exercises. And lastly, I have an erratic work schedule that doesn't lend itself to daily routine.
By working in practice episodes I can still improve my playing. I always start with music I'd like to play then make exercises out of the challenging parts as and when it's necessary.
Here are the general steps to take in real time:
1. Decide what you want to learn. This is important because you want to strongly connect the exercises in your practice schedule to a specific project. There are only rare occasions where it’s worthwhile to create a practice schedule and use it in isolation.
2. Break down what you want to learn into small, achievable chunks. What are the components of what you’re learning? Can you figure out the scale? The finger patterns? What are you physically doing in this specific project that can be broken down into smaller chunks?
3. Design your own exercises to match the small, achievable chunks. What specific fingerings are needed to play the solo/riff/song? Does the music rely heavily on a pattern of 1st finger, 3rd finger, 4th finger? Is there a specific picking pattern that’s challenging? Create exercises that work on your specific challenges from your specific project.
4. Repeat this process as you work through the piece of music.
It can be costly in time to work on things that may never become useful in your playing. Instead of having a set practice schedule, keep your improvement spontaneous, fluid, and fun in a project-based approach.
Myth #3: To be a good guitarist, I must learn everything there is to know about guitar.
There are 12 keys, 7 modes, 5 pentatonic shapes, 4 chord groups, 3 chord inversions, and 24 hours in a day.
Not knowing where to start, where to go, or how to get there is very common. What’s worse: being overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities can be oppressive - this is the Paradox of Choice. But you don’t need to master everything to be a great guitar player.
There is no set order to learn guitar concepts and if you’re not interested in any of them, you can easily ignore them.
For me, it’s the “Phrygian Mode.”
I never, ever play the Phrygian mode. It’s too dark for my taste and it doesn’t fit into any of the music I listen to and play. There has never been a time when I’m playing, writing, or rehearsing something and I think to myself, “Shit, I wish I had some Phrygian shapes on lock.”
Am I a worse musician because of this? No. And happily, if I ever decide I would like to play some Phrygian mode, I can just learn it then.
Meanwhile, I’ll just keep learning and playing music that is satisfying to me at the moment. The myth that you need to master all 12 keys, know every shape, scale and chord, and do all this at the drop of a hat is pretty shitty because learning guitar is not linear.
Jimi Hendrix was infinitely more proficient at playing with open E shapes than other keys and he turned out fine.
If you’re a Blues and Rock person, you’ll be able to play all kinds of stuff in the key of E and A, but maybe not C#. If you’re a Metal person, you’ll be able to play in drop D like crazy, but maybe have to think about the key of A. If you’re a Jazz person, you’ll be able to play in Bb and F automatically, but not have much experience in drop D.
Avoid getting stuck in the weeds thinking you need to learn A, B, and C before you can move onto X, Y, and Z.
It’s okay to just know A, C, and Y.
Myth #4: I need to learn the right way now so I don't ruin my playing later.
Many guitarists have a deep fear of learning a technique the wrong way and being stuck with it the rest of their lives.
What’s worse is that they feel the bad technique will prevent them from learning other techniques correctly and their whole guitar playing experience will be ruined. As a result, they become conservative guitar players. Good technique trumps the rest of the guitar playing experience and everything gets practiced slowly, deliberately, and precisely until it is mastered.
If you can live like this, that's great. But it’s really hard to stay motivated to slog through something like this. In the past, I’ve fallen victim to this myth. It didn’t cause me to play worse - it caused me to not play at all.
Paul McCartney doesn’t fingerpick properly, but he wrote one of the most quintessential fingerpicking songs of all time.
Of fingerpicking, Paul McCartney said, “I just figured out my own way of doing it; that’s really how I learned every instrument I play. On things like Yesterday and Blackbird I just hit the bass string and sort of flick the high strings.”
Instead of technique, some other part of the guitar playing experience drove him. He was inspired by Bach’s Bouree in E minor and, in a moment of curiosity, figured out Blackbird. Although McCartney is one of the most revered songwriters of the last century, it’s no secret how he got there: just plugging along, being generally interested in music and observant to the world around him. In his own words, good technique didn’t factor into the equation. Could he play what was necessary to make the song? Sure. Was it perfect? No.
Had McCartney been stricken by perfectionism, the rest of his guitar playing experience wouldn’t have emerged.
You can always change your technique.
This hot take is controversial as fuck. But listen:
When I learned fingerpicking, for some reason it made more sense to me to play with my fingers positioned upside down. Instead of playing thumb, index, middle, ring, I would play thumb, ring, middle, index.
For like, 10 years.
Just a couple years ago I decided to take classical guitar more seriously. There is a serious history of technique here and I realized I had to switch my whole hand position to accommodate this style. After a day or two of challenge and discomfort, I could play reasonably well with my changed technique. After two weeks, I couldn’t imagine going back to playing the old, incorrect way.
I originally learned what I learned the way I learned it, and when it was time to change, I changed. It wasn't that bad.
Enjoy being an amateur because it only lasts so long.
In this essay, the author makes the case for enjoying amateurship.
She gives permission to not strive constantly for the next thing. You can be satisfied musically at whatever level you’re at. Moving toward musical goals that are currently out of your reach is good and necessary, but there should be a balance between being happy with where you’re at now and where you want to be later.
Getting bogged down in the details of technique is among the best ways to stifle the joy of being an amateur.
Avoid these myths to have a better guitar playing experience.
Teaching yourself guitar online is hard.
It's tough to worry about being good, the best, or any other comparative metric. The best you can be is a successful guitarist who has a positive playing experience. This can take many different forms, but anyone can achieve it.
Avoiding these myths will allow you to pick up your guitar everyday with clarity and comfort no matter if you're practicing hard or playing hard.