{"id":5482,"date":"2013-07-17T17:44:21","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T17:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=5482"},"modified":"2013-07-17T17:44:37","modified_gmt":"2013-07-17T17:44:37","slug":"ill-give-it-an-85","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/ill-give-it-an-85\/","title":{"rendered":"I’ll Give It An 85 – It’s Got A Good Beat And You Can Dance To It…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember Dick Clark and the old American Bandstand<\/a>?<\/p>\n

There was the “Rate-A-Record” part where they would play a new song, and ask a couple of the dancers to rate the song on a score of 1 to 100.<\/p>\n

The joke is that they almost always said, “I’ll give it an 85, it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”<\/p>\n

In other words, the song was good enough and they could use it.<\/p>\n

Well in guitar-world I often get asked about how good is “good enough” when it comes to learning one lesson and moving on to the next.<\/p>\n

The reality is that mastering one lesson could take months… whereas memorizing that lesson and assimilating what it has to teach you might only take a matter of days or weeks.<\/p>\n

Mastery – being able to play something flawlessly as if you created it (“owning it” as I call it) requires enough technique to be able to play it flawlessly in the first place. You may have that kind of technique already, but chances are you don’t.<\/p>\n

So you have to find a happy medium here. You have to get to the point where you have the lesson memorized, because you can’t really practice something if you have to keep looking at the music to see what comes next. That’s 2 different actions with different goals in mind.<\/p>\n

If you have it memorized and you can play it, but it’s a little too slow and there are a lot of mistakes, you need to keep working on it a bit more.<\/p>\n

Ideally, you’ll get it to where you play it at full speed (whatever that speed happens to be) but you might make some mistakes along the way.<\/p>\n

Mistakes are not the enemy. It may be that your technique is just not quite developed yet in that area.<\/p>\n

Let’s say you are working on the first lesson from Blues Guitar Unleashed<\/a> but your barre chords really aren’t that good yet. Should you give up on the rest of the course? Absolutely not!<\/p>\n

In fact, the reality is that the only reason for that lesson is to prepare you mentally for how you’ll use chords in lesson 4 down the road. So if you gave up just because your barre chords down sound perfect, you’d be missing out on a lot of great stuff very soon.<\/p>\n

If you get to the point where you can finger the shapes, but all the notes don’t come out every time, you’ve got it good enough. If you can strum it along with the example and make the changes – even if the chords don’t ring out every time – you’ve got it good enough.<\/p>\n

As you move on to the next lesson and practice the things there, your technique will improve. And as you move on to the lesson after that, your technique will improve.<\/p>\n

And as the old saying goes, “A rising tide raises all ships.” So after doing some of the other lessons, you may go back to that first lesson and find it remarkably easy, even though you haven’t been working on it at all.<\/p>\n

That’s because the technical end of playing guitar, the “hows,” are very different from the mental side and the understanding, the “whats.”<\/p>\n

Learning “what” to play is different from “how” to play it. And sometimes they don’t move at the same speed and that’s OK.<\/p>\n

Above all else, don’t give up. I’ve seen students come in week after week for many months and struggle with certain techniques… then one week they show up and they can just play it with ease.<\/p>\n

In my experience, technical advances come in leaps, not in slow, small, steps and many people would have you believe.<\/p>\n

And if you feel like you are beating a dead horse when it comes to a particular lesson… just put it aside and move on to the next one.<\/p>\n

In the end, that’s the fastest way to improve and it happens to be the most enjoyable as well… it’s a win-win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember Dick Clark and the old American Bandstand? There was the “Rate-A-Record” part where they would play a new song, and ask a couple of the dancers to rate the song on a score of 1 to 100. The joke is that they almost always said, “I’ll give it an 85, it’s got a good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5482"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5484,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5482\/revisions\/5484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}