Guitarchitecture.org

If you’ve ever had insomnia and turned on a television, you very likely have seen info-mercials that are based on success formulas.  “I made $1,000,000 in recycling and you can too!”  The concept being that if you want to be successful, you should emulate what successful people do and you will get the same results they did.

The problem with this scenario is the “one size fits all” mentality for success rarely seems to work.  One possible reason for this is so many factors go into “success”, it’s difficult to glean all of the components that go into helping make  someone successful.

For example, you could watch an instructional video of someone playing a lick quickly, learn all of the notes being played, practice diligently and still not be able to get the lick sounding the same because of any one of a number of factors (hand tension, timing, phrasing, string thickness etc.).

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While it’s easy to look for successful models and try to emulate that success, it can be even more informative to look at what doesn’t work and model a path against failure.

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You can read a book about Donald Trump and still be no closer to achieving his level of success, but if you watch Intervention and see someone who short circuited their career by being a full blown drug addict – you can decide not to follow their example and make a conscious step towards being who you want to be.

Here’s a music related  example.  When I first started learning guitar I tried to learn a lot of solos in songs I was playing.  As a commonality – they were all fast and required a lot of technique, and I assumed that if I learned the notes below tempo I could get the solos up to speed eventually.  My practicing “method” was to just play these licks for hours on end to get them as fast as I could.

In this process, as soon as I could play the lick quickly I would try to play it faster (which was actually – faster than I really could play them).  In addition to making things sloppy, it also made my hands really tense because I was trying to play a lot of things outside of the realm of my ability and this tension carried over into my playing. I could usually get the speed of the notes, but there was a lack of clarity and most certainly, a lack of fluidity.

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It goes without saying – this is not how you want to practice something.

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In conjunction with writing my books, I watched every guitar instructional video I could get my hands on to see how my methods stacked up.  Here’s what I found:

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Very few people can teach material to others well.

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The amount of information that was misleading or wrong was shocking.   It occurred to me that many people are poor teachers because they either don’t know the material at a deep enough level to be able to explain it to someone else or because they have no concept of how to relate that material to other people.  This makes the job of the student that much harder, because the student now has to sort out what the teacher is trying to say rather than what is  actually being said.

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Ignorance is contagious.

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Ignorance is viral.  It spreads quickly and easily and once infected, it can be a difficult process to overcome.  In my own case, the problems I developed by “practicing” in the wrong way has taken years to try to fix and is still an ongoing process.   (This speaks to why it’s important to learn things the right way the first time and how difficult it is to overcome bad habits).

If you take this to a YouTube level – you’ll find many people who play a lot of notes but can’t play well.  Some times there’s no concept of phrasing.  You see out of tune, out of time bends with no control followed by a flurry of notes hiding under a ton of effects.   I’ve seen the tension I talked about above in a lot of online videos.  The notes are kind of there – but not really.  You get the feeling that if you were to put a metronome down on a table and drop the tempo by 1/2 that it would completely fall out of the pocket or more likely completely fall apart.

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By observing and reflecting on  people getting things wrong it can inspire you to see elements of weakness in yourself and correct them.

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When I see someone play badly, I try to figure out why it’s bad and then try to see if there’s something I can take away from it to develop my own playing.  Maybe it’s a simple observation like, “Ok I really need to work on my vibrato” – but I try to make each observation a lesson.

How not to do things relates to goals.  It’s about looking at an outcome and saying, “if I do not want this to happen what steps do I need to take?”   It’s advantage over merely examining how to do things, is that it gets your hands dirty and forces you to come into contact with the nitty-gritty behind various processes.  In this way, it may help you come to a deeper understanding.

Thanks for reading!