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How to get better at guitar

jakeworth.com

181–190 of 276 posts

Re: How to get better at guitar

#181

This brought to mind a quote from Ira Glass: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your…

Stephen King said something similar (but I'm sure I'm misquoting): Every writer begins with one million terrible words inside them. The sooner you get those words out, the sooner you get to the good stuff.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#182

This brought to mind a quote from Ira Glass: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your…

Are you implying some people don't have taste, or less of it? I like to call it interest. What makes something interesting to some that I'm not sure.

Taste absolutely can and does evolve the more you play. It doesn't mean that everyone taste evolves towards one absolute taste, people stay different.

I kinda think it applies to all artistic hobbies. On one hand you learn a practical hands-applying skill, on another hand you learn how to express yourself and/or listen to expression of others in chosen medium. And, well, the more you look at something, the more you see. The more you see, the more you know your own preferences.

What's even more funny, the "detail perception" skill doesn't always sync to your guitar skill. So (for me at least) there are times when I'm thinking I'm the hottest stuff around (because I just mastered something I deemed important), and there are times when I'm down because my detail perception suddenly got better and turns out I would prefer to play with more nuance (but didn't learn how to yet)

Re: How to get better at guitar

#183
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more of urban legend that may somewhat hold true in tourist-heavy areas.

I’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore. I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.

I would assume it's grating for anybody to hear their mother tongue butchered. More so when both sides know they could just switch English and have an adult conversation instead of struggling to buy a loaf of broad and a bottle of water. I always feel the urge to switch and have to remind myself that the other person is making a big effort on their side and that should be appreciated and respected.

P.S. My mother tongue is Spanish and it's many accents are anything but standardized.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#184
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I picked up Violin as an adult, have done recitals, and I suck. Being able to suck and find joy in something anyway even if you're not top nth percentile is a valuable life skill.

I think it's pretty frustrating if the songs/pieces you actually want to play are demanding or even at the virtuoso level. If you really want to play a David Gilmour guitar solo or sing some Led Zeppelin, it better not suck because it won't hit the mark at all. For me, the reason to pick up the guitar as a kid was to play stuff I liked, stuff that turned out not to be that easy, and every time I play, I feel that gap…

There's plenty of good stuff that's hard to play, but there's also so much good stuff that's relatively easy.

It's also obvious to me that at this point I'm never going to reach the virtuoso level even if I really wanted to, but so what? I suck, but whenever I manage to play something that I couldn't before it brings me joy.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#185

This brought to mind a quote from Ira Glass: > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your…

I was at a dance hall the other day, and this young lady came floating in. It's hard to describe how she walked - just like she was effortlessly gliding. It looks easy, but anyone else would look like a moose trying it. It's the result of a lifetime of ballet dancing. Probably 10,000 hours, at least. I was just in awe.

Not to counter your point, but you must have never seen moose moving at speed through a forest. They are astonishingly graceful and surprisingly quiet.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#186
Deliberate practice. Whatever you do, take it slow and careful. Learn it the right way once slowly. If you learn it too quickly and too surface level, you’ll practice-in mistakes and create 10X “tech debt” to solve later.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#187
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is more of urban legend that may somewhat hold true in tourist-heavy areas.

I’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore. I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.

Weird, I'm French and most people I know are rather delighted to hear foreigners speak French. We have quite a few English pensioners living around where my family lives, and I live myself along the Flanders/Wallonia border in Belgium so we're quite accustomed to hearing "bad French" speakers I guess, but the popularity of foreign speakers singing in French seems to indicate that foreign accents isn't really a problem for many French speakers.

People being annoyed at bad French is stereotypically Parisian to me.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#188

> When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down How do you do that with chords? I know everyone who isn't completely tone deaf can do that with one single note. But when it comes to chords, unless you already know some music theory, aren't there huge number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?

I'm still an amateur and always had problems with this, got some advice from an experienced jazz pianist I know. His suggestions were roughly to:

1. Start by transcribing the root note that you hear

2. Go back and see if each chord sounds major or minor - most of the time that will give you a major/minor third

3. Go back and play the 5th, and see if it sounds right - most of the time it'll be there

4. Don't worry about 7ths/9ths yet, they'll come, but give them a go

5. Once you've got a few chords, try and figure out the key, and that will help figure out others

So he was basically suggesting to transcribe by each note's function in a chord, starting with most -> least important. It still needs some music theory of course, but doesn't need you to listen to an entire complex chord at once.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#189
Love Justinguitar, but I disagree with this approach, this tells you very little how to actually play the guitar, just to know songs and train your ear and transcribing. The main takeway here is that to become an artist you need to get good at copying.

Everybody that plays guitar have tried to transcribe a riff or a song. But not all have become great guitar players.

The way to go is to have an objective. Is it playing a difficult song like Cliffs of Dover? Playing blues? Rock? What is it? Focus on that style or song. COPY. Become a copy machine.

One example is doing bends. There are many ways of doing a bend. Most if not all blue players do it by holding the neck of the guitar in a very specific manner, so if you want to play blues, you need to copy them. It must be a perfect copy.

Playing the guitar is mostly a physical activity where motions and understanding of the body, and how this is wired into your nerves and brain matters.

If you just transcribe and play riffs, you won't be able to play in a high BPM, because in order to do that, you need to be extremely efficient with your movements, understand speed picking... and people have studied and developed those techniques for many years -- you don't invent this over, you watch videos, practice and copy it!

By just playing and transcribing you'll develop terrible habits which at some point will limit your playing, and will feel like it will take an eternity to correct. That's when most of the people stop playing.

And of course, play songs that are at your level, so typically lower speed songs with simpler chords and then from there understand what music style you want to focus on.

A guitar teacher can help you with that because they can easily come up with exercises and songs that would match your skill, but if you want, you can do that yourself.

Once you become advanced in guitar, then you'll for sure know it, and then you can experiment to do bends in a different way, or do something that would make you stand out, but at first, it's mostly about copying. Later you can innovate.

TLDR: best way of learning guitar is focusing on copying everything, the motions of a player being the #1.

Re: How to get better at guitar

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a jazz musician, and my kids are both professional classical players. I've asked them why they don't learn to play jazz. My daughter described pretty much what Glass is saying here. She calls it "fear of sucking." She knows what good jazz improvisation sounds like, and trying to make herself do it is pretty discouraging. Not that there's anything wrong with loving and playing classical music, which is a factor to…

I picked up Violin as an adult, have done recitals, and I suck. Being able to suck and find joy in something anyway even if you're not top nth percentile is a valuable life skill.

That's why I enjoy singing so much. Moderate skill good enough as most people can't even bring themselves to do it in public out of embarrassment.

My sister is in a whole different league than me in terms of singing but she also performs live, which I don't plan to do unless it's a karakoe evening.

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