{"id":6436,"date":"2014-12-03T07:26:39","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T07:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=6436"},"modified":"2014-12-03T07:26:39","modified_gmt":"2014-12-03T07:26:39","slug":"the-rising-tide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/the-rising-tide\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rising Tide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"iStock_000001256830XSmall1\"Do you ever feel like your attention is being pulled in 12 different directions?<\/p>\n

There’s a cool song to learn, scales to work on and memorize, licks to learn, maybe that acoustic thing you were wanting to do… there’s just a LOT of cool stuff out there to learn and do.<\/p>\n

I like to look at this way, the alternative is much worse. We’re a lucky bunch in that we’re fascinated and enthralled with something<\/em>… and it just so happens to be the guitar and making music.<\/p>\n

But depending on your own personal level of “go with the flow-ness” you may have a really hard time… it’s easy to feel like you’re abandoning one thing if you go off and work on something else for a while.<\/p>\n

Like one of my students who wrote me the other day because he felt like if he worked on that Silver Bells arrangement<\/a> I sent out that his work on Blues Guitar Unleashed would somehow suffer…<\/p>\n

Quite the opposite, in fact, would likely be the outcome… because you see, the rising tide raises all ships<\/em>.<\/p>\n

While working on the Silver Bells arrangement for his upcoming holiday guests, he’ll be learning new techniques and improving many of the same techniques needed for his BGU material.<\/p>\n

So in all likelihood (and I know this from both my own personal experience as well as my students) he’ll come back to the BGU stuff playing it even better than when he left without even working on it for a few weeks.<\/p>\n

Sure, he might have forgotten some notes, but remember that memorization and execution are 2 different things. Once those notes are back in the brain – the execution will be better than ever.<\/p>\n

Plus, the re-memorization time is super fast compared to learning it the first time. Usually a day of refresher is all that’s needed.<\/p>\n

But before you run off all willy-nilly learning something different every day – that’s not at all what I mean here.<\/p>\n

You still need purpose in your practice each and every day… and you still need to see small goals through to completion.<\/p>\n

If your goal is to play “Pride & Joy” note for note… and you’ve got the notes memorized but you’re still fumbling around a lot – feel free to put it down for a while and pick up something else for a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

But if you’re that guy<\/em> who knows 4 notes of 50 different tunes\u00a0and can’t use any of them? It’s time to focus more (and you know who you are \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

And especially if you’re more towards the beginning stages – time on instrument is all that matters. You’re getting better every day you spend on that guitar and it really doesn’t matter what you’re playing!<\/p>\n

So when you find you’ve got a few emails of lessons in your folder you’ve saved them to and one catches your eye don’t be afraid to step to the side for a couple of days and work on it.<\/p>\n

By and large most of the lessons I send out via email can be done fairly quickly if your skill level matches the lesson. I try and keep the big 30-40 minute lessons few and far between so I don’t derail what you’re working on.<\/p>\n

Chances are you’ll come back better than ever!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Do you ever feel like your attention is being pulled in 12 different directions? There’s a cool song to learn, scales to work on and memorize, licks to learn, maybe that acoustic thing you were wanting to do… there’s just a LOT of cool stuff out there to learn and do. I like to look […]<\/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":[27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6436"}],"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=6436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6437,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6436\/revisions\/6437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}