Guitar Lessons – What my Fender is Teaching Me

It’s been almost a year since my children bought me an electric guitar for Father’s Day, but I only recently picked it up, not because I wasn’t interested, but because I thought I had to be good at it, to move from beginner to rock star in three months or less.  It did, however, look really cool leaning against its stand in our living room.

Finally, after six months of exploring and listening to just about every style of music I could cram in my ears, I gave into my curiosity and picked the thing up.  I wanted to learn the language of music, at least well enough to place an order for a simple tune.  It’s only been a couple of weeks, but already I’m learning a few things, some of which I’ve learned before.  Repetition helps when you’re forgetful like me.

So, here are just a few of the things the guitar is teaching me.

Bad is the only road to good.

No matter how much you want to be good at something, you first have to be willing to be bad.  You have to go through the awkward phase of the beginner.  I don’t care how much innate talent Mozart possessed, at some point in his development, he was clanking keys. 

So, I’ve been placing my fingers on the wrong strings and plunking out some truly atrocious sounds, but every now and then I get it right.

If you want skills, your title’s meaningless, your name’s irrelevant, and your money’s no good.

If you hold a powerful position, come from a royal lineage, or have loads of cash to toss around, you can find someone with the right skills to do things for you.

But if you want to possess those skills yourself, none of the above will help.  The only acceptable currencies are time and effort.  This is good news.  It means the playing field is equal and accessible to everyone.  You’re free to run in the open and head for the goal line of your choosing.

I’ve practiced and played every night for a week and my fingers have already turned a few seemingly huge hurdles into small matters.  No, I haven’t mastered the guitar, but I’ve learned a few tricks through my time and effort.

To gain experience, you have to meet the clock, not beat it.

There are a lot of products on the market that promise to teach you how to master something in X number of days or less.  I don’t know how they can make such claims.  Things take as long as they take, and you won’t know how long that is until you finish them.

I can’t rush through the process of learning to play guitar, but I can keep showing up for practice.

Doing something slowly is a great way to explore and learn.

When you’re a beginner learning a new song, you have to take it slow, working out where your fingers go and how to move from one note to the next.  The result is something unexpected.  The song you’re playing doesn’t sound like the one you intended to play.  The timing’s all off.  The notes hang around too long and the spaces between them are too wide.  But something else happens as well.  You get to spend time with all the notes, one by one, and the slowed down version you’re struggling through begins to sound like your own personal arrangement of the song.

Piddling with AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells, I’m playing at half speed, basically turning a driving rock anthem into a distorted ballad, but I like the way it sounds!  I’m in no hurry because I’m actually enjoying stringing it out.

Any art form you explore is not a single mystery to be solved; it’s an endless series of them.

Regardless of the creative activities you choose to engage in, if you stick with them long enough, you will one day come to realize there is no summit to reach.  It’s not as if you are climbing a mountain and will one day reach the peak.  The moment you begin, you are already standing on the peak, looking out at an array of endless possibilities.  Your job is to decide which one you’re going to explore next.

I’ve been practicing just one song, playing pieces of it over and over again, until they become clearer to me.  I’ve been looking over the tablature and seeing how the notes work together and how it could be possible, with time and effort, for someone as raw and inexperienced as me to learn how to play them.  But this is just one song.  There are scales and arpeggios and other songs I could learn.  I could learn to write my own.  I could learn to play with other musicians. I could collaborate with other song writers or musicians or dancers or even visual artists and create something never heard or seen before.

As we begin, you and I are not at the bottom looking up.  We are at the summit looking out, deciding where we’d like to fly today.

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Tagged as: encouraging words, Motivated