Hi Robert, My $0.02…
As you note part of this is habit and part of it is the specific issues you may be having with the song.
When I’m first learning a song, if there are chord changes that I’m having trouble with, I use the Justin approaches of both chord perfect and OMC. If the problem is the strum pattern(s) I’m trying to use, I focus on just the pattern with muted strings and some the chords form the song.
When I practice the song, I commit to play it completely through. This helps me learn to deal with mistakes and it shows me where I’m having issues that may need more focused attention. If there aren’t any big issues to work on, I play the song completely through regularly. I eventually feel confident with it, especially because I know how to recover from the inevitable mistakes.
You are doing the right thing but you need to practice one more thing: Playing the song throughout:
After finishing the first part of your practice (learning sections, chord changes etc.), also practice playing entire sections, then the entire song.
For e.g. say to yourself “I’ll practice Verse 1 now” or “Bridge now”, or “now the whole song”. Once you set your intention, there’s one rule: You can’t stop no matter what. Even if you completely mess up, what’s gone is gone and you try to pick up from the next bar.
Ideally, you would practice this to a metronome, but for starters, it would be easier to play along to the original. I would suggest spending the majority of your practice time for this with an external timekeeper: metronome, drum track, backing track, or original. This is because:
You can’t cheat
Your timing skill improves
Sync’ing to an external time-keeper accelerates learning
@roger_holland@nhh2oskr@elevatortrim
Thank-you for responding and proffering great advice!
I will play the songs through completely as I practice, using a metronome and backing tracks.
I can do this!
Hi Robert, I think what Justin warns about is to avoid thinking that just playing a song (or an instrumental piece) over and over is going to improve without any additional work. This additional work can vary depending of the song or piece and the guitar player. For me is a progressive perfecting, try what I want to play, identify what needs to be improved, devise how to improve it, practice what I’ve devised, try again. If a section of the whole song or piece is more difficult to play I can alternate between practicing only that part and trying the whole song or piece. So instead of stopping the whole song on the hard to play spot every time I practice, I can practice that spot alone, and later practice again the whole song or piece or at least a longer section of it.
Hi, not sure if you know that YouTube allows you to list videos as “unlisted” so only people with the link will see them.
This is what I do with mine to limit viewing to people on here.