3 Danger Zones For Beginner Guitarists
Whether you’re a brand new beginner or just coming back to the guitar after a long break of not playing for years, you are probably looking for good free tips and advise online to help get you started again in the right direction.
This seems like the right thing to do but there are some hidden dangers that could cause serious problems and could even cause you to never learn to play the guitar and achieve your guitar playing goals! But I won’t let that happen to you…let’s take a closer look at these danger zones.
The 3 Danger Zones For Beginner Guitarists
1. Guitar forums and other “free” guitar sites
2. YouTube and other videos sites
3. Sight reading (trying to learn to play, by reading music)
GUITAR FORUMS
People that hang out at guitar forums for the most part are beginners. Rarely will an expert hang out and post anything. People who know how to play guitar are out playing gigs, in the studio, or at home playing guitar!
While forums can be fun, it’s not a great environment to learn guitar because it’s often the blind leading the blind. If you’re like most people, you quickly realize that there’s no real information on forums and decide that you need a more visual approach to learning.
YOUTUBE!
So you’re off to YouTube and you type in “learn guitar” in the hopes that you’ll find some great quality content. Instead what you find is lots of “show offs” showing off their own chops.
Even if you do find some real lessons they still won’t help much because they are one off lessons and not part of a step by step series of lessons.
The fact is while these video’s are entertaining, it’s impossible to learn guitar just from watching them. Even my own free videos on YouTube aren’t enough for you to learn how to play on your own.
You need a system you can follow step-by-step, showing you what to do in a particular order. Watching a thousand guitar video’s in hopes you’ll learn to play guitar is like watching a 1,000 people fly an air plane in the hopes you’ll become a pilot.
It just doesn’t work.
So guitar forums and YouTube videos don’t work what about…
READING MUSIC?
Ask anyone off the street to tell you three things you need to know if you want to learn to play the guitar and I guarantee you that learning to read music is pretty high up on the list.
If you think about it learning to play guitar by reading music is kind of crazy… here I’ll prove it to you right now.
When you were a small child just learning to talk you just started to mimic what you heard. You didn’t learn to read first then speak did you? No, of course not.
It was only after you could speak fluently that you were introduced to the idea of learning to read and much later you began to learn grammar and all the rules of writing. Learning guitar is exactly the same way because music played on the guitar IS a language.
For most guitar players, reading music is only a vicarious way to feel like you’re really learning to play the guitar when in fact you’re only pretending to learn.
Sure you may learn a few very basic things and feel good about it for a while but then you’ll hit the wall of sight reading and still wont be able to play hardly anything. At least not anything you would want to play for an audience, unless of course your audience is your mom.
Then depression and discouragement sets in before you know it, your guitar is back in it’s case, safely sound in your closet for next 10 years. Of course, you don’t have to let this happen to you.
So What Should Beginners Do?
As a beginner everything you practice should be to develop the physical part of playing the guitar…nothing else should be added for now. But the good news is, once you have it down and it works, you don’t have to revisit the process of mastering technique ever again. You just keep it ‘Warmed Up’.
That’s why the time you spend on REAL technique practice is absolutely the best investment you can ever make – IF… you
know what really works and what doesn’t.
That’s what I did for years…..test and discard….until I had a distilled list of practice material that gets you as far as possible with technique in the shortest amount of time. And reading music, visiting guitar forums and watching YouTube videos aren’t anywhere on the list!
Now usually when I mention the word technique or exercises people instantly think of stupid single note, single string finger exercises…that’s not what I’m talking about here…I’m talking about exercises that involve both chord and scale ideas that can be used to produce real music…in other words it’s not something you practice and then throw out…been there, how about you?
These exercises are something that you can take with you to the gig…make real music and real progress at the same time. My course Guitarin60Seconds is the result of my trials and has proven to be 100% effective in improving your physical guitar playing skills.
