Video transcript:
Hey everybody in this video I want to talk to you about something that you have probably never been taught before when it comes to learning guitar. It’s something that I think should underlie your entire guitar career though because it has to do with the fundamentals of learning to play. Learning guitar simply has to do with two things – learning the correct methods to playing, and then practicing a lot – and that is pretty much it. If anybody tells you anything else they’re probably trying to scam you. If they tell you that you need to spend 20$/hour on a teacher that is a lie too, because many of the greatest guitarists are self-taught, although it may work for some people if they have money to burn. In this video I want to talk about the mechanics of how your brain learns, to make practicing more efficient for you. After you watch this video you’ll be able to spend much less time learning because you’ll understand how you learn and the best way to learn.
If you want to know the correct methods to playing, I recommend this guitar course at this link here, you can go check it out if you want. It is a great way to learn guitar because it will take you from beginner to advanced guitarist. It will show you how to play simple songs and it will also show you how artists like Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page and Tommy Emmanuel get the sounds out of their guitars that they do. You’ll also be teaching yourself to learn, rather than wasting money on private lessons, which in my opinion also makes it less likely that you’ll get sick of it.
For now, let’s talk about how you learn.
Guitar is all about imprinting your neural tissue with patterns that allow you to play guitar. When people who have played for a long time and are good at guitar play, they do not remember individual notes. For example, I know how to play the song Bron Yur Aur by Led Zeppelin. I only learned it once – and now it is imprinted in my muscle memory. When I play, I don’t think about the sheet music or tabs, I only just let my fingers play and make sure it ‘feels’ accurate and ‘looks’ correct when I am fretting. But I don’t really have a clue what I’m playing. I couldn’t just tell you what notes to play right now, without picking up a guitar and actually going through it slowly myself.
It comes automatically – it’s like my fingers know what to do somehow. Interesting thing that you’ll find – if you screw up or are interrupted at a point in a complicated song you’ve learned, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to resume from the exact same note you left off on. You’ll have to go to a major turning point or a point in the song you remember very well that your mind uses as a kind of reference point.
When you learn a song, your mind remembers it from certain reference points and then encodes the rest of the notes in relation to those already learned. This is how the brains of most people work. Unless you are some kind of autistic savant who can remember all the names in the phone book, your mind will have consciously at hand only the most important details, and you will not be able to access the rest of the information unless you use reference points that stimulate that point of your mind.
So the point of this whole discussion is to help you get to know your mind better and how you learn, so that you can learn to play much faster with better dexterity and timing.
What you should take from this is if you come to a point in a song where a chord change is hard for you or switching to another note quickly is hard for you, simply practice it over and over until your muscle memory encodes it. Practice just the change first, over and over, then practice it with the surrounding notes, over and over. Sometimes it might be very hard and you might get tired after too much practice, but don’t worry.
If you get tired of practicing the same thing, let your hands and your mind rest. You’ll come to notice something that happens after you rest – the next time you pick up the guitar, you’ll very likely be able to play what you were practicing much better than you ever could. That is because your brain encodes the muscle memory patterns you want it to, then after you rest your mind, you are able to use them more effectively.
So find something to practice that you can’t do very well, and then practice it like I’ve described above.
Really, all you need to make sure is that you’re practicing correctly, and then practice. That is the secret to becoming great at guitar.
If you want to learn how to practice correctly from a real pro source, I’d recommend that guitar course I mentioned earlier, because it is cheap and it can take you from beginner to pro guitarist… You won’t have to waste 20$/hour or more on a guitar teacher. Click the jamguitar.com link in the description if you want to see more about the course… If you want to learn more tips like I’ve given you in this video to get an even better start on learning the guitar, check out the video link at the top of the video description. In that video I also talk more about the guitar course I mentioned apart from some more important tips for beginners guitarists. So cheers, and good luck!