I’ve been practicing Beginner Module 17 for about 3 months, slowly, with a metronome, and everything is still going pretty slowly and poorly. 1) What’s going wrong? 2) When is it time to move on?
Hi Anna, if you could share more details of what part(s) of Module 17 you’re struggling with then the community might be able to understand what’s going wrong and give you advice to get it going right.
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And/or upload a video of you playing the parts you’re finding difficult.
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There are some lessons in Module 17 that gave me trouble as well. For example, I practiced “How to pick individual strings while strumming” for 6 months, but I was pretty solid with “C shape explorer” within a few weeks.
I’m gonna GUESS that only one or two of the lessons in the module are giving you trouble. In that case, I suggest keeping them as part of your daily practice and replace the practice items for lessons you already are comfortable with new ones from the next module.
Ed
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I don’t know this lesson(s) in particular but I’d definitely recommend taking a break, doing something else and then coming back to it in maybe a month. The other question is the particular thing in the lesson relevant to what you want to get from guitar? Once I’d learned the basics I then picked out the lessons relevant to the songs I wanted to learn… there’s plenty of time to fill in the gaps later if I decide they are important.
It’s important to keep it fun or that’s when people quit
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For “move on” do you mean stop practicing this module, or do you mean watch the next lesson?
For me, I fill my practice with as much as I can reliably do in a practice. Once I have something working well enough to drop it from regular practice, for instance incorporate into a song, I drop that dedicated practice, and then fill that time block with something new.
My practice elements are filled with elements from across all the grades - wherever I need the work, but time is heavily near the point of my newest learning because I decided I had the previous stuff learned well enough to use in a song.
The stuff that is older and still in my daily practice are elements I find particularly challenging. The challenge may be due to physical things that need to catch up - like finger stretching, or mental things like timing fingers and pick.
I certainly do balance this with my goals of what I want to play. If the lesson doesn’t have any clear use for me, then I work on it a little so I can recognize it if it comes up later. There are many things I went through quickly that I later discovered how I’d want to use them and needed to go back and get far better competency with them - for example barre chords are my current old thing I should have spent more time with and also kept working on since they did get kind of rusty.
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Well as Justin says dont practice the things you can do practice the things you cant do so spend more time on the difficult things and less on the easy things I`m still at mod 10 and the alternate picking on the c maj scale is giving me some probs but the mini a barre & the la bamba riff i find easy i had nearly nailed the f barre chord until i changed the strings from 9-42 to 11-52 now have to work on that a bit more.
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For “Picking Individual Strings While Strumming,” I can barely play it correctly twice in a row at a very slow speed. I can also only do a few reps in a row of the “Easy Triads” exercise before I make a mistake, and certainly without any embellishments. I am also not sure what my target speed should be. The same goes for “Thumb and Finger Strums.” Slow and sloppy and not sure of my target speed. Thanks!
Thanks for this. I find it a little tricky to “mix and match” modules since they are often interconnected. But your method gives me a good sense of how to possibly go about it.
It’s good to hear your experience, Ed. “How to Pick Individual Strings While Strumming” is definitely giving me a hard time as well. I’d say there are three or four lessons that are giving me trouble in this module.
My “target” bpms for those modules were:
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Picking Individual Strings While Strumming - 80bpm before changing patterns, then 120bpm after all patterns are doable at 80bpm
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Easy Triads - 80bpm
Why these numbers?
For me, I wanted to be able to use “Picking Individual Strings While Strumming” to “fancy-up” otherwise boring 4-chord pop songs, and 120bpm is a good average for a Pop-song tempo. I have now applied this technique to my arrangement of “Pink Houses” by John Cougar Mellencamp.
I wanted to use picked and “stabbed” triads as embellishments over a blues track. 80bpm is a “not-too-slow, but not-too-fast” 12 bar blues tempo for me.
YMMV,
Ed
I’ve been in 17/18/19 for awhile now too. There’s several concepts that need a lot of practicing in these modules. I float around practicing between all the exercises to keep it interesting so I don’t get too bored.
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I struggled massively when I got to Grade 03.
I really enjoyed Grade 01 and 02 and went through the content smoothly and pretty confidently, hitting 03 was like hitting a road block (not just a speed bump).
I understand that Justin wanted us to start taking more control over our own practice direction, but personally I would have held off on that until the next grade, which is labeled intermediate levels, that would have given a more clear cut distinction and expectation that things would be very different.
I found grade 03 to be very jarring and disheartening to the point that I’ve gone through all the lessons three times from the beginning and every time I hit grade 03 my practice suffers massively. I so wish 03 was structured like 01 and 02, but it just feels disjointed and directionless.
There are many fundamental skills that could have been drilled in a similar way to grades 02 and 03, like slides and bends, that were stopping me from playing normal songs, so I had to just go searching for them through the later grades.
This is one of the most common flaws that I see with instructional courses (in any discipline). I usually feel that the starting lessons are too simple, like you’re fragile glass that’s in danger of cracking any second. Then there’s a very small part that feels just right, then suddenly you’re kicked right into the deep end and it becomes overwhelming. No one seems to know how to handle advanced beginner content well.
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That’s a helpful reference, thank you.