As we all know, learning guitar can be a tough challenge.
Struggling beginners often feel “lost” and confused, and if you’re a beginner, you may feel the same sometimes.
Well, if so, this post will help.
You see, over the years I’ve gotten 1000s of emails from people who join this list telling me about their frustrations.
I’ve also taught well over a hundred students in person and there are now over 4000 comments on my members’ site (despite only adding the comments feature about 2 years ago).
That’s not me bragging or anything, it just shows I’ve heard a lot of frustrations over the years, and I sympathise with students (I’ve experienced a lot of these frustrations in the past too).
If I had to sum up the most common issues most guitarists tend to struggle with, and the biggest ‘progress destroyers’, I’d say these are the big five:
- No repertoire – i.e., songs that are too hard or boring to play.
- Poor musicality – do the songs you play sound sloppy or weak?
- Low motivation – many struggle with the desire to practise.
- Bad technique – this means painful fingers, buzzing notes, or awkward movements
- No plan – having no idea what to practise is, of course, very frustrating.
To make it worse, if you struggle with one or more of the above areas, it will likely impact other areas of your playing.
For instance, not having a good repertoire of songs to practise will probably decrease motivation.
Having bad technique tends to hamper musicality.
They all have a knock-on effect on each other.
The aim is to score at least a 7 on each of the above.
If your repertoire is a 7, but your technique is a 4, it will hold you back.
Likewise, you might have developed good basic technique and might score a 7 here, but if your practice plan is at a 3, then you may struggle to develop as fast as you would like.
So it’s worth taking some time to think about where you are with your playing and the above five elements.
I call the above the ‘5Gs’ of guitar playing.
I’ll be talking more about these in the near future, and how to use them to develop and accelerate your guitar playing further.
For now, I should say, at the core, all of my courses focus on one or more of these elements, but the best place I can help you improve all of them is in the Dan Thorpe Acoustic Academy.
Inside, you’ll find all the ‘5Gs’ are covered.
I’ll be rewriting the sales page very soon to explain all this, but to find out more about how it can help your playing, you might want to take a look below:
The Dan Thorpe Acoustic Academy
Happy practice!
Dan Thorpe
Guitar Domination
P.S. This post was originally taken from Dan Thorpe’s private email list. To get blog posts like this sent to you which are full of great tips to make fingerpicking, strumming, and learning guitar more enjoyable (especially if you are over 40) join Dan’s list. It’s 100% free, HERE.
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