I really wish LHMP spelled something cool… that would be really great and make this even more memorable.<\/p>\n
And believe me, I tried… I tried to get something that would make a word, but sometimes you just can’t force it.<\/p>\n
Anyway, here’s the story behind this (there is always a story…)<\/p>\n
Do you find that you have trouble remembering your lessons? You might go over the lesson 20 times one day, but for some reason you can’t remember it all when you come back the next day…<\/p>\n
Well you’re not alone, it’s pretty common, actually. And at a private lesson we had an interesting conversation about that… (cue the weird music here as the screen goes wavy)<\/p>\n
If you remember “the before-times” (before the internet) when you used to get a new recording (be it on vinyl, 8-track, or whatever) you listened to it – and you listened to it A LOT. <\/p>\n
So much so that, if you didn’t have your music with you, you could usually just close your eyes and imagine the whole album front to back. For my student his favorite was Abbey Road by the Beatles, but for you it could be anything – it doesn’t matter what it is.<\/p>\n
The point is, in the modern world music is so easy to come by that we have it on all the time, but we aren’t listening to it.<\/p>\n
So my “L” is for listening<\/em>. Before you play a lesson, listen<\/em> to what it’s supposed to sound like a few times.<\/p>\n In fact, listen to it often enough that you can hum<\/em> it – the “H” is for humming. Simply put, if you can’t hum it, you can’t play it. That’s one of the main reasons Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing is so darn hard to emulate. He’s just got his own thing going on and it takes most people thousands of listens to get it down.<\/p>\n Now, if you’ve listened to the music, and you’ve hummed it a few times to yourself, it’s time to start memorizing it – the “M” is for memorize.<\/p>\n Your mind and your hands simply cannot do 2 things at once, and do them well. You can read the music, or you can play the piece well – you won’t likely get to do both until you are pretty advanced and it’s an easy piece for you to play.<\/p>\n And finally, you can probably guess that the “P” is for practicing. You can’t practice something you haven’t heard (listening,) that you don’t have in your ears (humming,) and that you haven’t memorized yet.<\/p>\n Of course, memorize in pieces and you can practice the parts that are memorized. But if you’re reading the music, you’re not practicing. So you might as well focus on getting it memorized since that is what you are doing anyway.<\/p>\n If you focus on memorizing, you’ll actually memorize it much faster and then you can get on to the practicing part.<\/p>\n Do all 4 of these things every day on anything you’re still practicing on. Once you have it memorize you probably won’t have to revisit that part, but continue to listen and continue to hum it to yourself when your guitar is not around.<\/p>\n If you do these 4 things, in that order, you WILL see improvement at a much faster pace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I really wish LHMP spelled something cool… that would be really great and make this even more memorable. And believe me, I tried… I tried to get something that would make a word, but sometimes you just can’t force it. Anyway, here’s the story behind this (there is always a story…) Do you find that […]<\/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\/7137"}],"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=7137"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7139,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7137\/revisions\/7139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}