I have looked through the resources available online and cant find any applicable advice to myself anymore. Perhaps I need to come out with my personal “practice schedule”, which is just notes all around my desktop about what to work on. (I guess they call it being “Agile” xD)
One interesting insight I found is learning to play a piece on guitar is akin to solving a problem, which involving solving multiple little “problems” when you go through the piece (you could disagree, I am used to think in this way thanks to my mathematical background 
)
And I find nowadays, learning a well arranged fingerstyle piece could be broken down into a few phases:
- Gather the learning materials as much as possible. Unlike piano where music score alone is sufficient to recreate the masterpiece, pieces on acoustic guitar need video guidance
- For beginners you could work from the start to the end. For veterans like me you could pick and choose passages from the song and practice them all at once. Both beginners and veterans need to get it slow and correct.
(Note: the most difficult passages can be any certain section so learning from beginning to the end is not that time efficient) - Then we talk about connecting the ideas. Try to play those separate passages we have practiced so much together, as intended by the guitar arrangement. It’s okay to make mistakes here but the goal is to play all in one go.
- Lastly, learn from the original performance. The emotional phrasing, the accent or dynamics you never thought of, and mistakes, I learn it by playing along with the original performance. And people would advise you to have your own style of playing at this point, but I admit that my style is immature so I need to learn from the best =]
Aannnnnnd, sometimes its good to forgo some of our “old way of thinking” when we incorporate new ideas, new techniques.
I think I have said enough. Thank you for reading, and your replies!
