Stop feeling overwhelmed with your guitar playing and start having more fun
As a teacher, over the years I have often heard students say things like “I don’t have time to practice everything I want”, or “I have so many things to work on, what should I focus on?”
These are all very real thoughts and over the years, I found myself in this situation countless times and seen many others go through the same struggles. What I’ve found is that learning the guitar is just like trying tidy your bedroom when you were a kid.
It was very easy to look at everything in your room and to feel overwhelmed with where to start. Here’s the trick: instead of looking at the everything at once, we just need to decide to work on something, no matter how small it is. What started with putting one small piece away eventually lead to a tidy room 😊
Now, how does this relate to your practicing? This can work in either of two ways, and you can decide which one is most appropriate for you:
1. Practice Time
Often times we can become overwhelmed with finding time to practice. If this is causing overwhelm for you, I’d recommend reducing what you expect from yourself down to just doing 5 minutes, for 1 day during this week. Gradually you can rebuild the habit up again, adding on one day at a time until you’re practicing as much you’d like to.
2. Practice Content
Another element to overwhelm is having too much to practice, or not being sure how to manage all your practice materials. As your teachers, we never, ever expect you to ‘master’ everything over a week. Becoming good at playing the guitar is an ongoing journey over time, so instead, shift your focus to just working on one little piece you learnt from a lesson (e.g. how to change between a G and a D chord).
If you are really struggling to make head way with this, having a guitar teacher will definitely help. But often I see students who are struggling with these things struggle to communicate their frustrations with their teacher.
Communication is so important for this! You really want to tell the teacher how you are getting on at home or how you are feeling about lessons so that they can improve what they are doing for you.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not a mind reader, and I’m guessing neither is your guitar teacher. So talk to them if you are struggling with these emotions!
Keep progressing one day at a time and you will be able to play everything on the guitar exactly how you want to.
About the author:
Guitar Tuition East London is a pure guitar school based in East Village, Stratford, England that teaches students of all ages who are passionate about playing guitar. With lots of extracurricular activities, they are able to help their students become great guitar players and confident musicians as well. Helping their students to progress fast both inside lessons and outside as well, they use innovative technique and approach to guitar teaching.