Having joined Justin Guitar and loving the highly structured lessons and course material, I’m finding myself already bouncing out of the rut I was in when I first arrived.
I’ve spent almost 2 years now practicing - but go figure - I never learned any songs to speak of. Parts of songs, riffs, and the such, but never an entire song, well - with the exception of one which I’ll eventually put on my learning logs when I finally get around to videoing myself playing.
Fyi - I’m a sorta intermediate (and sorta not - it’s complicated), but I’ve decided to start my Justin Guitar journey at Grade 1 Module 1 with the idea that I’m going to back-fill my weaknesses and break bad habits before they get anymore ingrained.
Which brings me to: So many songs within my reach. Stuff that I like. Stuff that I feel may be within my technical ability to play.
So - how does justin recommend approaching song practice? Should I concentrate on just one song until I have it down by heart. Two at the same time? What approach do others take on during their song practice?
When I went through the old Beginner Course, equivalent to Grades 1 & 2 (but have extra “stuff” now), I’d generally be working on 3 to 4 songs. I would start to learn a song or two for the new material (chords and strumming patterns) I was learning. As I moved on to the next stage, read Modules now, I would apply those new chords etc to new songs, while refining the previous 2. I took that approach through all of the 9 stages and then repeated the process during the Consolidation phase and again when I went through the old Intermediate, Grades 4 & 5.
Once I was happy I could play song start to end in the required manner ie simple strumming to begin with, learning new patterns as the course progressed, I’d put the song to the side and move on to a new one.
So in essence, applying newly learnt skills to new songs, while honing and refining previously learnt skills, to previous “new” songs, if that makes sense.
I’m in a similar position as the OP, in terms of being in a rut (as old as I am, maybe more of a canyon ) and starting from the beginning of Justin’s material to force some discipline and fill holes. Sadly my time is very limited so my actual song learning is correspondingly limited.
Toby’s advice is pretty similar to my own for you.
I also recommend you experiment with what you can handle for quantity or complexity. In my case, I have high demands on memory and time that cycle about every 4 months. This causes me to also cycle guitar learning out of sync with work. Trying to remember a new song when I am mentally fatigued just does not work for me too well, so I need to keep the number of songs to maybe 2 or 3. These take me months to learn in some cases, and I still have poor accuracy performing them.
I also did not like the beginner mode of strumming the chord - I wanted the song to sound like I heard. I went a long time playing the same stuff with the app but never really committing the song to memory.
I am frequently surprised by the complexity of what I want to learn. I sat down to learn a solo for a song I have the rhythm part in pretty good shape. It sounded very straight forward. On close inspection, the first two notes turned out to be a sound I do not know how to make, so need to dive into research on how to get that sound. This is the kind of thing that causes me a great deal of time to get “in the ballpark” so the song sounds right, but eventually also puts more technique into my capability. Sometimes I may just choose to go the easy route and play just the notes and plan to learn the technique later. You will need to decide if you desire exactness or beginner playability and plan your song learning accordingly.
I found that’s when the magic of music really happens for me! Easier sad than done, but all worth it! Just do your best to have songs down by heart, it’ll be more than enough!
) and starting from the beginning of Justin’s material to force some discipline and fill holes. Sadly my time is very limited so my actual song learning is correspondingly limited.