{"id":695,"date":"2011-10-17T13:01:15","date_gmt":"2011-10-17T18:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/?p=695"},"modified":"2023-04-03T08:54:06","modified_gmt":"2023-04-03T15:54:06","slug":"learning-guitar-the-roundabout-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/learning-guitar-the-roundabout-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning Guitar The Roundabout Way…"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Practicing<\/a>
The shortcut to playing the guitar is to take the long way around sometimes…<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let’s say you really want to play a song – any song will do but let’s pick Stevie Ray’s “Pride & Joy” as an example.<\/p>\n

But right now, you don’t play very well. You can’t play any songs at all.<\/p>\n

So you spend the next 3 months hunched over the TAB and Youtube videos until you’ve learned all the notes to Pride & Joy.<\/p>\n

You feel great now, right?<\/p>\n

Probably not – it’s not going to sound very good.<\/p>\n

But let’s say that instead of spending 3 months trying to learn “Pride & Joy” (which is probably too hard of a song to start with anyway… but I digress) you instead spend 3 months learning a few common chord voicings, some common rhythm and strumming patterns, and a couple of lead patterns.<\/p>\n

You spend a little time each day focusing on your technique, and a little time each day focusing on the building blocks of guitar playing and blues playing specifically.<\/p>\n

When you’re done with that 3 months, you decide to go back and learn “Pride & Joy,” but this time you discover that you’re able to learn it in 2 days instead of 3 months.<\/p>\n

And not only does it sound better, but you realize that you can also play “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Guitar Hurricane,” “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” “Purple Haze,” “Born Under A Bad Sign,” “I’m Tore Down,” and a bunch of other tunes without too much additional trouble.<\/p>\n

So using the “direct route” you learned 1 song in 3 months. Using the “roundabout” way, you learned 12 songs in 3 months and a week.<\/p>\n

More importantly – in 6 months you’ve learned 20 more songs instead of 2 songs.<\/p>\n

Now I’m not against learning songs – quite the contrary as I’m all for it. I think it’s a big part of learning to play and you should devote some time to it every day once the basics are down.<\/p>\n

But if you don’t have those basics, those fundamentals, and you’re just going for gold right off the bat, you’re really setting yourself up for some disappointment. And if there’s one thing I’ve seen that takes people from playing their guitars to using them as closet decor, it’s frustration.<\/p>\n

Think about some of the things you need to know in order to actually play a song like it sounds on the record:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Chords – you need to be able to play all of the chords in the song. If you don’t know some of them, you’ll have to learn them.<\/li>\n
  2. Scales (or melodic lines of some sort) – If there are melodies or lead lines, they all come from scales and will require your ability to play single notes to be up to par<\/li>\n
  3. Rhythm – you have to be able to play along with other people or the recording. If you can’t play in time that’s going to be a problem<\/li>\n
  4. Dynamics – you have to be comfortable playing this stuff or it won’t sound good. If it’s forced, it’ll sound forced. Just looking up how to play an E7#9 chord won’t make it so that you can play it easily on command. You’ll have to give it some time to sink it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Do you feel comfortable playing most any chord that comes along? If not, obviously you’ll need to get that way…<\/p>\n

    Do you know what scales are likely to be used when trying to learn the solos? Can you play them comfortably?<\/p>\n

    I realize that everyone wants to learn songs, I was the same way…<\/p>\n

    But in my own learning journey I discovered quickly that trying to learn songs first wasn’t going to help me be a guitar player, it was only going to help me play a single song…<\/p>\n

    In the years since I’ve learned the basics, I’ve learned thousands of songs, and if I need more I can usually learn them within an hour or less.<\/p>\n

    Take your time and learn the basics, the building blocks, first. Any of my “Unleashed” courses<\/a> will have those things for you.<\/p>\n

    Griff<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Let’s say you really want to play a song – any song will do but let’s pick Stevie Ray’s “Pride & Joy” as an example. But right now, you don’t play very well. You can’t play any songs at all. So you spend the next 3 months hunched over the TAB and Youtube videos until […]<\/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\/695"}],"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=695"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8401,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/695\/revisions\/8401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}