Find out how your favorite players reached their goals. Often times this is hard to do since you can’t always sit down and talk to some very famous musicians. But interviews exist as well as a few biographies on some musicians (especially dead ones).
Surround yourself with better players (or at least with those on your same level.) When you started out playing guitar, everyone was better than you, but now you have grown and there are less people better than you than before. The better you get, the harder it will be to find others who are superior to you to hang around or jam with.
Remember that its ok to daydream and fantasize about where you are planning to go, but it can’t stop there. Don’t wish without planning! Don’t dream without doing! And always, always, have a strategy.
Create a strategy! You need a strategy that will layout exactly how you are going to reach your goals. Dreaming alone won’t take you anywhere. Telling yourself that you are going to play your guitar everyday isn’t enough. There is a lot more that goes into being an excellent player than simply playing your guitar.
For instance, the process may go like this: I notice I have trouble with a fast scale passage in a piece I am playing. I notice a particular note starts disappearing when I reach a certain speed. The note is being missed.
I notice the finger responsible for playing that note is the third finger. It is not getting to the note because it is going up in the air in reaction to the second finger being used right before it in that particular scale passage. In other words, it is tensing in reaction to the movement of it’s neighboring finger, and I have not been paying attention to it. I realize this is a bad habit that pervades my playing, a third finger that tenses up in reaction to the use of the second finger.
What I didn’t know was that even though I was learning to keep up with these chord changes, I had so much muscle tension in my arms and other parts of my body, that I was locking in tensions that didn’t have to be there, and would come back to haunt me a few years later as I attempted the classical repertoire, where you don’t really get away with things like that. As the years went by, and especially in teaching others, I realized that it doesn’t have to be that way for anybody! There is a way of going about it that doesn’t create or allow this situation.
For instance, practice chord changes. Perhaps switching from an F barre chord to a D open is driving you crazy. Spend ten minutes going over and over the change.
