How to Break Free from Guitar Learning Ruts: Top Five Causes and Fixes

Feeling stuck in your guitar journey? Discover practical solutions to break free from those frustrating plateaus and unlock your full musical potential. In our latest episode, we promise to guide you through the chaos of information overload, teaching you how to organize and prioritize your learning effectively. By setting SMART goals, you'll create a clear path to follow, ensuring progress every step of the way. Our unique "buckets" method will revolutionize your practice routine, balancing technique and theory to keep you from focusing too heavily on any one aspect. 

But that's not all—we celebrate the unique artistry of guitar legends like BB King, Bob Dylan, Steve Vai, Lee Rittenour, and Tommy Emanuel. Each has carved out their own distinct path, exemplifying the vast and diverse world of guitar playing. We delve into the importance of appreciating these artists' journeys while encouraging you to forge your own unique musical identity. Whether you're seeking motivation, organization, or personalized instruction, the GuitarZoom Academy could be your key to developing a sound that's truly your own. Tune in for inspiration and actionable advice to elevate your guitar playing to new heights.

Links:

Check out the GuitarZoom Academy:
https://academy.guitarzoom.com/

• Steve’s Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/stinemus...
• GuitarZoom Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarz0...
• Songs Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarSo... .

Chapters

• 0:00 Breaking Out of Guitar Player Plateaus
• 3:49 Use "buckets" for varied, consistent guitar practice
• 7:26 Prioritize creativity for authentic musical play
• 11:46 Guitar Players' Perspectives and Advice
• 13:04 Find Inspiration, but Stay on your own Path

Transcript

Steve Stine [00:00:00]:
As a guitar player, it's so easy for us to feel like we're stuck. We're moving along, we're learning a bunch of things, and then all of a sudden, bam. It feels like we're not making any progress at all. So I want to talk about five reasons why you might feel stuck and some solutions that you could look at to break out of that. Number one, overwhelmed by way too much information, or quite simply lost. You're buying guitar courses or videos or books, or you're watching YouTube or whatever it might be, and you're just inundated with information. Hey, I want to learn to do that, and I want to learn to do that. And what is that thing? And what does that scale and what is that mode and what is that theory? And you're just pulling in all of this stuff and there's no logical path from where you are to where you want to get to.

Steve Stine [00:00:44]:
You're just getting overwhelmed with too much information. That's the first thing is you've got to start trying to harness how much information is actually coming at you and why you're learning it and how it's going to benefit you. Now, if you learn a lot of different stuff and you feel perfectly fine with it, then this video isn't for you anyway. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you're just grabbing all kinds of random thoughts and practice ideas, and it's not really servicing a larger plan for your guitar journey, that tends to be a problem. So you need to be careful that you're not getting overwhelmed with way too much information. You need to start categorizing what's most important for you to practice, why you're doing it, and how it helps you in your guitar journey.

Steve Stine [00:01:27]:
And then you've got all of these other things, these add on things that might be really great and really fun, and you want to do those sometimes, but maybe those need to take a step to the back burner and we'll get to those at another date. Now, the next one we're going to talk about is lack of clear goals. Okay? Having a routine, understanding what you're trying to accomplish. We at GuitarZoom in our GuitarZoom Academy, we have what we use. They're called smart goals. And basically what happens is when we get a student that signs up with one of our instructors, we talk to them and make a game plan of where they are, what experiences they've had, the problems that they're coming across, and what are the solutions, and then coming up with again, actual, tangible, logical solutions. Not just, I want to learn to play guitar, I want to get better at guitar. But what does that mean? I want to learn how to play blues solos with more feel.

Steve Stine [00:02:24]:
I want to elevate my technical skills and we could even refine those even further, right? It might not just be technical, technical skills. Maybe you need more work with independence in your fingers or strength in your finger movement or speed, three notepra string patterns, whatever it might be. Maybe you're a blues player and none of that means anything to you, but you want your solos to sound more authentic, right? Have more expressiveness, more feel. Well, how do we do that? Like, those are more defined things than I want to learn how to play blues, right? Or I want to learn how to solo. So, and you can keep defining those as you keep really thinking about it. Start asking yourself, what are my goals? What is it that I'm trying to get to from where I am right now? And keep refining that thought process. All right, Number three is another one that I think is really, really important. Too much focus on one area.

Steve Stine [00:03:14]:
Now I've come up with a system that I use, I've been using for a long time that I refer to as buckets. And basically you just think about how over a daily practice routine or a weekly practice routine, whichever works better for learning, to go into a bucket and grab some information, and that's what you're going to practice for that day. So the next tip that I have for you is too much focus on one area. This tends to be a problem for guitar players. We just focus on the same things over and over and over. And while that is important into developing whatever that particular thing is, what I try and explain to players is to think about it as like buckets that you can dip in and grab some information from. So when you're developing your practice routine, maybe you have a daily practice routine. What I find with a lot of students is actually developing a weekly consistent practice routine actually might even work better.

Steve Stine [00:04:08]:
And I use what's called buckets. So we dip in, we grab some information and we go from there and we develop our routine. So let me explain this to you. So number one, for instance, would be the technique bucket. This is your fundamentals bucket. So this is something that you probably would practice just about every day. You know, grab your guitar, you start doing some warm up things and maybe you're doing some scales or, you know, chord bouncing or whatever the technique are that you're trying to develop. Maybe it's bending or vibrato or string skipping or sweeping or whatever it might be.

Steve Stine [00:04:38]:
But these are those raw fundamental things that you need to be able to play the guitar cleanly, efficiently. You know, all of that kind of thing. These are. These are the fundamentals that you choose that best fit your style and your journey. The second bucket is what I call the theory and fretboard bucket. So the second bucket has less to do with playing and more to do with thinking and visualizing and studying. So your music theory and you know, how things look on the fretboard. Maybe you're learning the cage system or, you know, a particular mode or something like that on the fretboard, and you're trying to learn how to visualize it.

Steve Stine [00:05:14]:
Maybe you're making some charts and you're trying to memorize those sorts of things. You can see how that second bucket is vastly different from the first one, because the first one is hands on. You're not going to develop your technique unless you get in there and start, you know, using a metronome and doing things over and over and over to develop that ability. That's what the technique bucket is. The theory and fundamentals bucket is a thought process bucket. So this is something that you could do again in the same day as your technique. You just do it in a different way. Maybe, you know, right after you get off work or school or whatever it might be.

Steve Stine [00:05:48]:
That's when you do your technique stuff. But maybe later on in the evening, that's when you do some of your studying. You just grab your guitar and you start trying to visualize things. And yes, of course you can play, but you're not focusing on technique. You're focusing on visualization and understanding, all of that kind of thing. The third bucket is what I call the song study bucket. I still believe that learning songs by other artists is very important. Just like if you wanted to become a painter, you'd study famous painters, right? Or if you wanted to be a writer, you would study other writers and the art of writing.

Steve Stine [00:06:20]:
Well, songs give us all of these opportunities. It's not that we just want to play songs. We want to learn how to do other things too. But we can learn from every song that we play, Whether it's a technical thing, a visual thing, a memorization thing, a composition thing. There's all kinds of different things that we can learn from songs. So for me, that is an essential bucket that you need to practice. Again, whether it's daily, maybe it's a couple times a week, whatever it is, if you play in A band. This becomes probably one of your primary buckets.

Steve Stine [00:06:51]:
If you play in many bands, this definitely becomes an important bucket for you. And these buckets will shift in terms of importance. Okay, number four, the. The creative bucket, and this is one that I think people just don't spend enough time with, is learning how to take all of these other buckets that we've talked about and start learning to develop you, to craft you and your ability to play. So when you go to improvise over a particular chord progression or a style of music or something like that, what is it that you think about? How does your thought process work? And when your fingers hit those strings, does it sound musical? Does it sound authentic? Right. That's what the creative bucket is, is spending some real quality time, not just going through all of these rudimentary things, but learning to craft how you play. How do you see the fretboard? What are you missing? Right? Spending some real quality time in that creative bucket is important. And then the fifth bucket is new ideas a little bit more generic.

Steve Stine [00:07:48]:
But the new ideas bucket can be great for motivation, right? A new song, a new riff, a new lick, a new scale, whatever it might be. You're bringing stuff out of that bucket and going, okay, maybe this would be great to fit into my technique or my theory or my fretboard or a song, right? So you're constantly feeding yourself some new things. I think that's really important, too. Number four, stepping outside your comfort zone. Again, I think it's very easy for us to get caught in the same old same old and do the same things all the time. We can step outside our comfort zone, even within the same genre. Maybe you're a blues player that really loves B.B. king and Buddy Guy and whatever.

Steve Stine [00:08:27]:
Well, it would be okay for you to step outside a little bit and look at some other players, some other styles within that blues realm. Maybe you're a rock player that could benefit from learning some jazz chords or some other styles of scales. There's lots of different things you can do to step outside your comfort zone. Not just. Not just genres and things like that, but just things like improvising the different ways that you could approach improvising from the way you're doing it now. Maybe you see the fretboard in more of a vertical platform where you want to start learning to see it more horizontally. Or maybe you're primarily more of a pentatonic player that would benefit from learning some diatonic ideas. Right? Now, the thing about stepping outside your comfort zone is playing with other people.

Steve Stine [00:09:10]:
Very important, you know, jam with other human beings. Maybe it's on stage, maybe it's not. Maybe it's just a Sunday afternoon with some friends or family or neighbors or whatever it is. But getting to the point where you're confident enough with yourself and your skill set to be able to get together with other people, which leads to number five, comparing yourself to others. I call it paralysis through discouragement. So this is a big thing as we watch YouTube and all these things and we see all these players and we go, I'll never be that good. Right? I can never do that. And the problem is, is that oftentimes we're trying to compare ourselves to players that have way more time to do what they're doing, or they do it for a living.

Steve Stine [00:09:52]:
Right. The other thing is the sort of. I won't call it the lie, but it's certainly the misunderstanding of certain artists when we see videos. And this would include me, too. When you see a YouTube video of somebody playing something, you know, you just assume, oh, that's the first time that they played that. And they're, you know, there's. There's never a mistake. They never make mistakes.

Steve Stine [00:10:14]:
It's flawless. But the reality is, sometimes that might be the 5th or 10th or 15th or 20th take of that video, or it might have been spliced together with different parts of things to make it as perfect as it is now. I'm not saying that sometimes you don't do something incredible and it happens on the first take. It happens, okay, but not always. And so, you know, we're all. It doesn't matter what guitar player it is. We're all struggling on our own level, right? To get. To get better, to get stronger, to get smarter, to get faster, to get more creative, to get more expressive, whatever these terms are.

Steve Stine [00:10:49]:
Everybody's doing it. It doesn't matter where you are in your journey. And so the most important thing for you is that you have to be careful that you're not comparing yourself to other people, and it's discouraging you. It'd be different if you were watching somebody and it's motivating and inspiring you, but if it's bringing you down, you're looking at this the wrong way. Right? And I could go off for a long time about this, but I always tell people, you can't just compare B.B. king to, you know, Bob Dylan to Steve Vai to Lee Rittenhour to Tommy Emanuel. Like, they're all different players with different skill sets. Some of them are, you know, their Focus is guitar, guitar, guitar with some composition.

Steve Stine [00:11:31]:
Some of them are singer songwriters, so the guitar is part of what they do. But they also have amazing voices or they have amazing skill sets of being able to write lyrics. Like this music thing is so vast. And you know, just taking someone like B.B. king versus Steve Vai, you could look at the two and go, well, Steve Vai has more technical skills. Well, sure, that's true, but does that equal more musicality? Well, I think that's dependent on the individual. You could have your own opinion on that, no doubt about it. And everybody does, certainly in our social media world.

Steve Stine [00:12:03]:
I'm just saying, I don't think BB King woke up every day going, man, I wish I played like Steve Vai. I don't think he cared. I think he was perfectly happy with where he was. But again, all the things we've been talking about maybe developing further of who he is. Steve Vai doesn't wake up every day and go, boy, I wish I was, you know, Tommy Emanuel. I wish I was Tommy Emanuel in another life. Because I love his playing, but that's not what I do. I do my own thing.

Steve Stine [00:12:29]:
So I'm inspired and motivated by Tommy. But that's not what my journey is. That's not what my guitar path is. I'm not going to blow up my entire guitar path just to try and play like Tommy Emanuel. Instead, I will watch his videos and listen to him talk and teach and be inspired by him. So hopefully that helps you a little bit. And just all of this, please remember we here at GuitarZoom we have what's called the GuitarZoom Academy. And we would love to help you if you need any help, with motivation, with organization, getting some one on one help with actual live lessons, with an instructor that's there to help you along with all of the things that I've talked about.

Steve Stine [00:13:08]:
So anyway, take care, stay positive, keep practicing and I'll talk to you soon.