Hello Everyone,
I am Molly and I’ve known justinguitar.com since I started to learn guitar 18 years agowhen I was in my thirties. If only I had practised and played all those years … water under the bridge. Here is my story.
When I started playing guitar I had private lessons for a few years - but they can take you only so far, at some point you have to take your guitar journey into your own hand. And justinguitar always had some great song tutorials or other lessons to watch and get ideas for what to practise next. But it is easy to start drifting and loosing focus if you are not sure where you want to go and if then life gets busy … I think a few people here are familiar with this scenario.
In my case I played less and less and then stopped playing altogether for five years. Busy life was one reason, but another factor was not being sure where I wanted my guitar journey to go. I always thought I just learn to play songs I like to listen to on the radio, mainly electric guitar, but that was a very random walk and never feeled really right either. During the years I was not playing I regularly thought “this is not great, something is missing” without doing anything about it. But there was a particular set of songs where I always thought “I really want to be able to play these songs”. Music that touched me on an emotional level and not just catchy tunes. Townes van Zandt was on the list and a few other singer-songwriters. Their music was different to what I used to play before my hiatus. And eventually their music made me pick up my guitar again - I so badly wanted to be able to play their songs that I was giving it second go to see if I can learn the songs.
Of course I had forgotten pretty much everything. What is an open C-chord? Hey, that hurts! Justinguitar helped me remember it all, bit by bit, over the last 3 years. I roughly followed the course and while I started to remember things It took me 1.5 years to get to the point that I could finally play one of my favourite TvZ songs - calluses don’t grow over night, and neither does finger independence you need in travis picking.
I have also started to rebuild my repertoire more or less from scratch. Before my hiatus I could play dozens of songs, but only a handful of these I still like to play, and instead I am learning new songs. There are few if any tutorials out there for the songs I want to learn and so I have picked up transcribing again as well. That is painful at first, but gets easier with practise, just like playing guitar 
But it also opens up ears and over time you hear more nuances in recordings. It was all about finding the music that resonates with me, and in a weird way not playing guitar for 5 years has helped me in that.
Setting annual goals has also helped me. Justin talks about that in some of his videos and I gave it a real try last year (2023). I wrote down at the start of the year what I wanted to learn during the year and where I wanted to be at the end. It was a very long list, and I broke it down into focus areas for each quarter. I made a few changes to the list during the year (I no longer aspire to learn Led Zeppelin songs) but I found that at the end of the year I had made real progress in every area I wanted to work on. Time and patience work wonders: you don’t learn anything over night, but if you give yourself a year you’ll be surprised how far you can get. If you haven’t tried it give annual goal setting a go. I highly recommend it.
There you go, that’s me.
Looking forward to hang out here and talk guitar stuff with you all.
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). I look forward to hearing more from you. Cheers! 