Starting one of these to keep track of things.
I’m a touch over 20yrs into this guitar thing and have made more progress over the past 9 months than I’ve made cumulatively over the past two decades. In 2023, I started to get motivated to pick my guitar up again. I have no idea why I didn’t get this motivation during the pandemic when I had more time. But a couple of years ago I started on a journey of personal improvement.
I was beginning to suspect ADHD was a problem for me, as I’d been having memory and executive function problems with work. I got myself evaluated and got a pretty lengthy report of things. Interestingly, I performed much better than average on a lot of things, but on a few key aspects of mental function, I scored significantly lower. It wasn’t an actual diagnosis of anything, just a documentation of symptoms, if you will. Symptoms consistent with ADHD. I tried some non-medical behavioral intervention stuff for awhile and made a little bit of progress before hitting the wall. At that point I decided to head back to my doctor and talk about my medical options. My doctor set me up with a prescription and that helped me out a lot. I started to work through some of the issues I had with work and worked my way up to “Leading Performer” status in my annual review.
The whole time, my desire to pick up the guitar again began to grow. One of my previous issues was an inability to stick to any kind of practice routine. I just needed to figure out how I was going to approach things this time. I had tried private lessons in the past, as well as a group class at the local community college. My other challenge is that my finger dexterity (or lack thereof) of my left hand makes progress go somewhat slowly. The private instructors didn’t really have a good scaffolded solution for this. And the group class just went too fast for me to keep up.
I spent several months looking at my options. I did a good bit of reading, considering building my own practice routine from scratch, and then pitched that idea because there’s just too much I didn’t know how to handle for teaching/learning music.
I started looking at online options. I ended up settling on TrueFire with their “Black Friday” sale. I bought a handful of lessons that I expected would keep me busy for at least 6mo or so and got to work. Their free intro lesson definitely hit on the kind of left hand finger dexterity and chord changing progressions I needed. I worked my way through those lessons and felt like I was making some pretty solid progress. I was learning lots of bits and pieces of things but not really focusing on anything in particular.
I was adding quite a few new chords, some strumming variations, even got into arpeggios, a little bit of single string melody work, and a bit of finger picking. I started to feel like I was missing some things, though. For one, all the songs I was playing were simplified and not really the “whole” songs. It was more than just a riff, but it still wasn’t quite the whole song. At this point, TrueFire also wasn’t doing anything with those ubiquitous songsheets. I’ve ranted about these in a couple other spots on this forum, so I won’t do that here. I was spending my time working with tabs and standard musical notation. Which is good, but also didn’t really help me with learning to play new songs outside of these lessons. I felt like I had learned enough technique and chords that I should be able to start trying to play with others.
My wife picked up ukulele around the beginning of the year and has been singing while she plays and has also been attending jams with other people on a pretty regular basis. She is actually in Nashville, TN right now at a ukulele festival learning new stuff and jamming with people. She’s been wanting to play with me for awhile. She hears what I am playing and has been getting pretty insistent lately.
I also tried attending a local guitar jam group’s meeting awhile back. That was a hot mess. I had NO idea what to do in the jam circle. Song sheets were handing out and the group just dove right on in full speed. There was no slow playthrough to get folks warmed up first. There was no instructional time for beginners (even though I broke off with the “beginners” circle). I was lost. I knew I needed to change my lesson focus.
I was starting to work on slash chords in the TrueFire lessons and I decided that this was probably a good time to stop adding tons of extra chords and new techniques and to start working on consolidating what I’ve learned so far and working on those sorts of big picture things like playing with others, using song sheets, and SINGING with my playing.
At that point I started up some of Justin’s lessons. A lot of it was repeats of things I’ve already worked through. Just done in a different context or with different language. It looks like the stuff I’ve worked on through TrueFire puts me near the end of Justin’s Grade 1 or into Grade 2 beginner stuff. Though Justin does cover some stuff in Grade 1 that TrueFire doesn’t, so I’ve been working on that, too.
Justin’s song lessons are what I’m spending the most time on right now, honestly. I like how he breaks them up by level, gives you an easy strum first, and then builds on that easy strum. He also throws in the song sheets AND the tabs, so I’m starting to familiarize myself with using those. I like the way he uses the song sheets, too, in that he writes down the chord for each bar/measure you play it (so when you play it for several bars in a row, he writes it that way). So I’ll start with the video and the tab to get the rhythm down, then switch over to using the song sheet as I get comfortable using these. It’s helping a TON!
This isn’t really helping much with some of my other goals, though. So I reached out to a local business that does some really awesome instructional work (man, I live in such a rad city with a great music culture) and signed up for some private lessons. I’ll be going to my first one in a few weeks after I get home from a short vacation. Hopefully now that I’m where I am in my learning path, I’ll be able to make the progress I am looking for. I think my goals are pretty reasonable at this point.
This uke fest my wife is attending right now is her 2nd one of the year. Lol. As a result, I’ve been keeping track of similar opportunities for guitar and I’ve found a few that are reasonably close by. A couple of them are very local. And if I ever want to dive into learning to play bluegrass guitar, one of them has a bluegrass focus where Billy Strings attends every year as a participant.
She also participates in an online uke group who records themselves playing songs on youtube and shares them among the group. She wants me to start participating in these whenever I can get up to the point that I can play with others. She got a bunch of recording gear so she could make better recordings for these. So she transitioned from recording everything with her phone to now having a Focusrite Scarlet, a condenser mic, a better video camera, and a bunch of new software.
I’ve met a handful of her local uke friends she jams with on weekends, and they’re trying to get me to switch to a baritone uke. I’m not going to switch, but I might add one when I feel like I am comfortable with guitar. For that matter, they’re pretty welcoming of guitars in their jams, so as I’m learning to play with others, that’s certainly a practice opportunity for me.