Playing the guitar is easy, it’s becoming the guitar player you want to be that is the hard part.  Most people can reasonably learn to play a few chords, crank out a little lead piece, or make it over a hump or two in the learning process.  But, when they see the mountain that they must climb in order to be truly great on the guitar, it can sometimes be down right discouraging.  Even though I have been playing for the better part of the last 20-years, I still run across guys who blow my mind with their ability to play.  Honestly, it can send me into seclusion for days and sometimes weeks.  It’s no secret to anyone that I have a weakness for sound.  And I’ve been known to sit in my room for hours tweaking knobs, adjusting hand positions, and working out what ever subtle changes need to be made to get my guitar playing from where it is to where I want it to be.   But, the crazy thing about it all, is that the most important lessons I’ve learned about guitar playing, I didn’t get from a teacher or out of some book.  Rather, the most important things I learned about guitar playing came from embracing my own struggles on the guitar and taking the time to understand more precisely how I was relating to my instrument and/or how I was failing to relate to my instrument.

  How exactly does one relate to their guitar?  You can walk into a room of guitar players and you will often find that there is usually one guy in the pack who is head and shoulders above the rest.  And that guy isn’t going to tell you why he is better.  His lips are sealed, if he even understands why he is ahead of the pack himself.  But, I’m going to explain the big secret.  It’s not that he necessarily practices longer than you do.  The difference is summed up in a few key areas that automatically sets him apart from being another average guitar player.  And if you can start to develop these areas in your own playing, you will start to see massive results also because all these areas improve the overall relationship that you share with your axe.

1.   Confidence

  How you feel when you play effects how you express yourself on your axe 100%.  If you condition yourself to feel like a lousy guitarist, you will express a lousy performance when you play.  If you want a piece to come alive when you play it, then start to express that energy in yourself before you even pick up your guitar.  This is why two guys can play the same chords, the same riff, and use the same gear and sound completely different from one another.  When I pick up my axe, it is because I intend to play and let the musician inside me take the reigns.  If you just sit their and act sluggish, it will come through in your playing.  If you let the emotion course through your veins and feel what you want to express, eventually, you will notice a dramatic change in your playing.  The music that comes out when you play is simply an extension of who you believe you are on the inside.  Often people mistake confidence for attitude, and so a lot of musicians imagine that if they develop an irritating attitude this will make them a better player.  Usually, it just makes them irritating.  I always like to think of Satriani and his attitude, because he is almost always projecting a pleasant positive attitude, he exudes confidence with his playing, and he gives you the impression that he is having loads of fun.  It’s what truly great guitar is all about.  And when he plays, you hear what is truly inside him reaching out to you.  When you can encapsulate the value of that in your playing, you’re already a step ahead of the average guitar player.

2.   Awareness

  I see it all the time, guitarists who learn a technique, but never take the time to examine what the technique is all about.  If you want to achieve a higher level of playing, you have to become aware of what you are playing and aware of what it is that you must do to make the changes in your playing that need to take place to get you to that next level.  It’s not uncommon for me to take a three hour lesson and study one aspect of my playing, such as how I am executing a piece.  Making sure my picking hand and my fretting hand are cooperating harmoniously, making sure i am nailing notes solidly, and making sure that I am catching all the subtle pauses in the timing that give a piece that extra special feel are all important to making massive improvements and rising above the rut of being an average guitar player.

3.   Troubleshooting

  There is simply going to come a point when your teachers aren’t going to be able to help you over that next hump and the struggle will be between you and your guitar alone.  Trust me, that is a glorious day to have greet you.  Because it means that you are finally at a point when you can do some genuine learning on your own and maybe even a little much needed pioneering.  Your most creative work on guitar is still future to your current state, if you will allow the learning process to continue.  But, if you always look to teachers for every answer, you are just robbing yourself of some of the most important learning experiences around.  Of course, I think teachers are important to have.  A teacher can introduce you to concepts and ideas you may not be aware of and they can get you over many initial humps in the domain of common knowledge.  And they might even have some valuable uncommon knowledge to impart to you as well.  But, if you never take the time to develop a sense of how to get yourself over humps in the road with your playing, you will soon hit a brick wall that you nor your teachers will be able to help you over.  Because your teacher can only help you as far as they understand how to help you themselves.  It wasn’t until I started teaching other guitar players how to play that i began to see more clearly why certain techniques were better than others.  Why certain parts of music theory worked to get me what I wanted and others not so well.  In explaining these things to other people, I was actually helping myself more than I was helping them.  Because it forced me to have to think out why things worked the way that they do.  So, I encourage you to teach others what you know on the guitar any chance you get.  The more you explain what you know, the more familiar you will become with what you do and do not understand about the guitar.  This will in turn give you a sense of direction to help you see what areas need work.

4.   Make Mistakes

  I’m a big believer in making lots of valuable mistakes.  Yes, you heard that right.  Mistakes are opportunities for the door of real learning to open up to a guitarist.  If you are afraid of making mistakes, then you have a limiting belief that is holding your playing back unnecessarily.  The trick with mistakes is to be willing to examine the mistake, understand why it is happening, and to reason your way around the problem.  And whatever you do, make sure to write down the process and what you learned from the investigation.  It’s often a good idea to keep information like that on file so that you can refer back to it from time to time and chart your own progress.  Because having a general checklist of things to pay attention to while trying to help yourself through a mistake is handy to have around the next time you are thrown for a loop.

5.   Exploration

  I’m all for people sitting down and learning to play their favorite bands song note for note with a perfect ability to recreate the work of another great guitarist.  And in all honesty, this is where true genius begins even for a lot of exceptional guitar players.  Unfortunately, it’s where it ends for a lot of exceptional guitar players as well who never reach their full potential.  The true innovators and masters of the guitar don’t spend their lives following in other people’s footsteps.  Rather, they spend more time looking for ideas that have not been overused already.  For some this means finding a new chord progression that has an unusual flavor.  For others, it’s learning a new way to bend the guitar string to get a unique sound out of it.  For others it means dropping their B string down to an A and exploring an entirely new way of tuning the guitar and learning music theory for that tuning all over again.  When you take a step off the beaten path and start playing around in unfamiliar territory on the guitar, you are undoubtedly going to run into a plethora of roadblocks along the way.  You might learn a new cool sounding chord, but have no idea how to use it in conjunction with other chords.  In fact, you might even find yourself on a college campus flipping through old music theory books or talking it over with some professor in his 60′s who has an expertise in jazz.  And that’s just to get a grip on what you have discovered and to find a few useful ways to apply it.  But, the key to exploration is to learn for the purpose of developing something new and fresh to add to your playing style to escape sounding average.

  By focusing on these five areas, you will develop a much deeper relationship with your guitar than you started out with.  These areas help you to identify what it is your guitar is capable of and more importantly what it is capable of in your hands.  So, I hope this has helped to shed some light on how one becomes the guitar player they want to be.