[Newsletter] 4 procrastination triggers that bog down people trying to teach themselves guitar online
Rotem Sivan on getting better at guitar; Learning what something is and isn't
Hello!
Hopefully you’ve had a happy week with your guitar.
I’ve been playing some Motown type stuff with a click and have been finding it enjoyable, yet only a little helpful. There’s a relationship between how difficult something is and how much it moves the needle. So this week, I don’t think I’m moving the needle a great amount just by chanking some chords to a click.
For me, this is like the opposite of procrastination: there’s no friction to prevent me from starting or doing the hard thing. I could just do it all day because it’s fun. But the catch is that I’m not getting much better.
But this week, that’s perfectly okay with me.
Something to think about
Frameworks, ideas, and methods to be a successful self-taught guitarist.
4 procrastination triggers that bog down guitarists teaching themselves online.
You always hear about people spending hours everyday in the practice shed - it’s like a badge of honour.
The average person might see this and think it's the only way to get good at guitar. You, yourself, might feel you need to keep up at this professional pace. If you’re not clocking in the hours, you’re not doing it right. This misconception leads to all sorts of problems.
One of the more dangerous problems to your overall guitar playing experience is productive procrastination.
Productive procrastination is the act of being busy while still procrastinating on your most important tasks.
Spending hours in the shed working on good, hard, brain-draining practice is extremely hard to do.
Like, so oppressively hard I think only a small percentage of the population is even capable of doing it. So instead, you might spend hours in the shed doing busywork (watching a tutorial on how to alternate pick faster, playing through your repertoire, trying to find shortcuts to learn x, y, or z faster, watching another tutorial on how to alternate pick faster). I’ve definitely been there.
But what defines these activities as busywork is that you never leave your comfort zone.
There’s an idea that time spent = results gained. But that’s not true.
It’s more like time spent practicing specific goals that align with your overall goals and are just out of reach of your current ability level = results gained.
(Time spent = results gained) x (productive procrastination) = a situation where you spend hours and hours thinking you’re improving a lot when you’re really improving just a little. With guitar playing, you will run into procrastination when things get hard, uncertain, and unstructured.
The irony is that if you do run into these feelings, chances are you’re moving in the right direction.
Here are 4 procrastination triggers and how to move past them.
The more difficult the technique or concept you’re practicing, the more likely you’ll procrastinate. It’s important to not try to do too much beyond your current ability level. What’s ideal is working on stuff that is just out of your reach - you know you’ll get there with a little work, but it’s not light years ahead.
Stress will prevent you from starting in the first place. If you suspect what you’re about to do will be stressful, why bother starting? This is why it’s best to have a healthy relationship with your guitar and a clear vision of what you want your overall guitar playing experience to look like. With clearly defined goals and finding the line between work and play, you can enter each practice session knowing you are just playing your guitar and there’s nothing to worry about.
The previous trigger becomes worse when our specific and general goals are ambiguous. If we haven’t thought about how action [A], [B], and [C] will lead to result [X], [Y], and [Z], it will start to feel like you’re playing and practicing in a vacuum. It’s important to have a North Star to guide your guitar playing journey: what kind of music do you want to play? What kind of guitarist do you want to be? Why do you want to know guitar?
You will feel unmotivated to pick up your guitar even if your goals are clear, but your approach to getting there is unstructured. Spend some time honing your practice routine. Make sure you keep track of your progress and make adjustments as you go. Ideally, you will create your own exercises from the challenges you encounter in the music you’re learning. It’s important to structure your guitar work in a logical sequence rather than doing a little here, then a little there.
Something to watch
My favourite performance or lesson I’ve seen this week
I've been following Rotem Sivan for a while and he's one of the most thoughtful educators in online guitar education.
In this video, he gives some unlikely tips on how to simply get good at guitar. What I like about these tips is they go deeper than what you typically expect to find in a video like this. When I first watched it, I was expecting the usual: get a practice routine, play to a metronome, CAGED, etc. But, instead, the theme of these tips is connection.
Sivan always seems to ask his audience, "How can you better connect yourself to your guitar?"
Of the 7 tips, here are the ones that resonated the most:
Feel the sound. Instead of just playing shapes and patterns, pause to really think about how what you're playing is making you feel. You're trying to connect your feelings to sounds. Now, when you play that chord, it's no longer an abstract sound in space. It's a word in your personal sound language that means something specific to you based on your own life experience.
Sing it. Sometimes you see people sing along to what they're playing when they play a solo. They've connected their voice to the fretboard. This is really hard to do when you're not used to it, but it's worth it because you'll have musical ideas start in your mind rather than with your fingers.
Write. Sivan says he used to feel like he wasn't ready to start writing music, but his view now is it's never too early to start. I love this. Even beginners can write by taking some open chords they just learned and combining them with a rhythm. It's not about writing a great, original, inspired piece of music - it's about getting into the habit of making clear choices.
Something to practice
If you’re going to bother to practice, you might as well make it worth it.
I recently came across an interesting practice concept in the book Uncommon Sense Teaching by Barbara Oakley.
It’s effective to interleave similar techniques or concepts and practice them in rotation instead of picking one and drilling it. But here’s a twist: choose something you want to learn and try to get it into your long term memory by not just knowing what it is, but knowing what it isn’t.
If you are ear training, you might go on a website like this and play intervals from the major scale. You guess each interval and develop your ears this way.
But applying this approach would look like this: go on the same website and set up the same exercise, but choose an interval you specifically want to work on. For example, a major 3rd. Now, when the intervals play through, all you’re trying to figure out is if that interval is a major 3rd or not.
This will help you learn much more effectively. Instead of having a fleeting series of intervals go through your mind (where you might be making guesses in relation to the previous sounds), you will develop a rock solid idea in your mind of what a major 3rd is and be able to recognize it instantly without any previous sounds to relate it to.