Hello community. I can’t believe its been three years since I started this journey but here I am.
It’s been a ride, for sure, ups and downs. For those of us out there who are like me and just want to be playing the guitar well, you understand how it usually feels like more downs than ups.
I am sitting in Grade 4, doing Major Scale Maestro 1 lessons. I don’t feel behind where I should or could be, or ahead either. I finally got to a point where I realized I am simply where I am. I was a fair bit frustrated with the Gr 1-3 courses all the way right up to the end of Gr 3, to be quite honest. I realized about halfway through that every lesson was going to introduce something new (and I knew why it’s structured that way), which is fine, except that it made me feel like I wasn’t progressing in anything in particular, and I wasn’t. Basically I was terrible in 100 different ways. That bothered me greatly for at least the past 18 months.
The last 6 months though, I noticed some things clicked. My fingers started working together better instead of being a see-saw in terms of improvement where each hand was improving in a different timeline from the other. It took over 2.5 years but I don’t feel as clumsy as I did for so long. Not that I am not clumsy because I 100% still am, and I am still strumming the wrong strings just enough to piss myself off.
But many things have improved a lot over the past year or so, namely-
- Speed of chord changes, especially transitions that have turned out to be sooooooo common, they’re in like almost every song.
- Hammer-ons and pull-offs have gotten a little easier.
- Scales practice is getting faster even with alternate picking, which feels pretty natural.
- Playing with faster tempo is easier.
- And probably foremost for my personal sanity I am able to learn songs faster.
- Power chords are more comfortable and natural.
- Palm muting, from the moment I learned the concept started to feel natural, like how does one play electric without some form of palm muting?? Not that I am great at it, but it feels very natural to me. Fret hand muting started to feel natural as well, like I struggled with trying to curve my short fingers up over the strings too much, but I didn’t know any better. And speaking of such, I just made peace with the fact that my playing will be quite flat fingered. Who cares, I guess. I found a few female petite players who have tiiiny hands and are mind blowingly good, and they inspire me.
- And barre chords! After my thumb stretch experience and doing 4 weeks of physical therapy, I can say for a fact that strengthening the hand with repetitive exercises for several weeks makes the squeeze needed for barre chords feel, well, I hate to say easy, so I’ll just say easier than before I strengthened my hand.
There are probably more things I could talk about seemingly starting to feel easier. So many techniques started to just work a little more, suddenly. I still haven’t learned a whole lot of songs. I am still using the app to play along to songs simply for song suggestions and because the chords are provided, so its kind of fun, but I feel like its a little bit boring sometimes when I know the song isnt in the right key, and maybe its simplified down to just some basic chords. But hey, that’s playing guitar if I’ve ever seen it, so there’s that.
So anyway, its been a ride, and I’m still on it. I’m looking for ways to learn the kind of music I want to play, hard rock and metal. I may have to venture out to other course websites to get a metal or rock lesson path. But I am going to definitely keep up with Justin’s lessons until I get to the jazz part, which i have no interest in, but the blues stuff I guess I’ll try to do as time passes, mainly because I just really like Justin.
Happy guitaring, everyone. Thanks to those in the forum here who were and are genuinely helpful and understanding.
