Hi there, I'm Tomas so should you learn songs or practice guitar exercises
to make the most progress possible? Well you probably heard it I guess. The short
answer there is both of course but probably the real question that's
implied is "How much should I do exercises and songs and what balance and
when should I do exercises and when should I work on songs?" I don't know if
you're like me but when I first started I just want to learn songs, stuff that I
liked and recognized or stuff like
Oh boy that brings me back. Anyway I didn't really want to
do exercises and then thought about certainly not I doesn't care about
reading music or even guitar theory. But I found over time that my attitude
has changed significantly and partly because I really found that I wasn't
making the progress that I wanted to. So for a long time I had you know 1 2 3
mediocre type teachers mostly the kind to say "What do you want to learn this
week"? "What did you learn that week"? and just showed me little parts of songs and
licks and it was fun but I quickly realized I wasn't getting anywhere but
then I found a really good teacher. He was probably my best teacher ever and my
first lesson with him, I played several things for him and he stopped
and said "First of all, you're playing stuff that's beyond your level and
you're not doing it justice. It's creating problems. It's causing you to
tensed up and to kinda do things in a way that in the long run it's just going to
create bad habits and you're never gonna play them really well. And then finally he
told me it's better to build step by step using exercises to different levels
as you go and really prepare yourself so you don't over strain or over tense and
have to break that habit later on. Now he proceeded to
give me a routine step by
step routine and insisted I follow his routine. It was not easy for me to accept
because I like doing my own thing but it was the best thing I ever did. And over
the years from my own experience I found that putting an emphasis on learning
songs is really kind of a slow boat to being able to play guitar. I know it
doesn't seem like it at first but there are several problems. One is that it's
really hard to choose a song that's the right level or appropriate for exactly
where you're at. You're gonna naturally go for something that you just like and
without any real consideration for really is this the right next thing for
me to work on. But most importantly by playing songs,
you're really not working on specific issues enough an efficient way in other
words let me do a very simple example. Let's say ... I was playing a song
that was C, A minor, F and G something like
I'm really going for a simple example here. And I wanna work on that
F chord. The partial bar F chord is where my problem is. Every time I play
this song to work on the F chord I've got a way.
There's the F now I get to work at it, listen. And now we go on ...
I've got to go through that whole song again. That's really a very simple song.
Most songs aren't that simple. Most songs you have to play quite a ways
before you get to the issue. Why not do an exercise that isolates that F chord.
You know first maybe just practicing the F chord and then maybe going from that chord to
another chord. And then keep scaling it up little by
little until it turns into ...
But by that time you'll have gotten much more work on that F chord and given a
chance to actually remember what we're wrong and work on it. In short, if you
want to make progress as quickly as possible with the least amount of
frustrations. You want to select songs and exercises that are appropriate for
your level with the emphasis on exercises that build up step-by-step to
sort of the next song that you're working on or the next level of exercise.
Now it's okay to stretch from time to time as a matter of fact I encourage you
to try stuff beyond your level just don't sit there and do like I did then
bang way out of thinking that if I just spend enough time I get it even though I
broke it down just do it long enough to get the sense of "here's where I'm at"
''here is how far I am from getting this" Now go back and work on this stuff step
by step and it shouldn't take long to do that 10-15 minutes at the most.
That's it for this week. Thanks for joining me. I'm Tomas Michaud from Real
Guitar Success. Wherever you're watching me on YouTube, Facebook or on my blog
leave me a comment. I really like to know what you're thinking and certainly let
me know if there's something you'd like to see me make a video on. So I'll let
you get back to your guitar practicing for now. Give you your best.