How To Grow As A Guitarist Without Touching The Guitar

We break down the hidden skills that make guitar progress stick: deep listening, patience, consistency, mindset, and confidence. Then we connect theory and fretboard knowledge to real musicality so you can play with certainty and stop getting lost in songs.

• multi‑level listening for chords, intervals, dynamics, and structure
• mapping songs mentally from intro to solo to breaks
• long‑term vs short‑term practice planning
• daily consistency over marathon sessions
• mindset choices when frustration hits
• building confidence pillars for different styles
• dropping harmful comparisons to online players
• linking theory and fretboard knowledge to real musicality

Check out the Guitar Zoom Academy and have a conversation with me or one of my other instructors. We can tell you all about this and how it works and what we can do for you and how we could work together

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 Welcome And Topic Overview
• 0:49 Deep Listening As A Core Skill
• 3:04 Song Structures And Mental Rehearsal
• 4:52 Patience And Long‑Term vs Short‑Term
• 6:20 Consistency Beats Marathon Sessions
• 7:27 Mindset, Frustration, And Smart Pivots
• 10:43 Confidence Over Quantity Of Tricks
• 12:42 Letting Go Of Comparisons Online
• 14:54 Layers: Fretboard, Theory, Musicality
• 17:04 Invitation To Learn More

Transcript

Steve: 1:11

Hey everybody, Steve Stine from Guitar Zoom Academy here. Today I thought it'd be nice to talk about a couple of different things for you to think about. Some skills that I want you to think about developing that have nothing to do with technique. Okay. The first thing I want to talk to you about is learning how to listen. And this is multiple levels of learning how to listen. There's the obvious learning how to train your ear to hear chords, to hear major, minor, hear intervals, different kinds of things like that. Hear chord progressions, you know, there's all kinds of different things in the listening environment in terms of theory, in terms of, you know, listening to somebody play and then being able to identify with what it is that they're playing and uh anticipate through understanding music theory and things like that, what might be the next chord. You know, you're in the key of G and you know one, two, you know, one, four, five is major and two, three, six is minor, and that sort of thing. But the other thing I want you to think about when it comes to listening is understanding dynamics. Listen for dynamics. Listen for changes that your your band might be giving you in terms of the approach that you're gonna take to your playing. You know, maybe you're playing a little softer or something like that. Also think about listening in terms of song structures. Sometimes people struggle with playing songs like memorizing things, uh, you know, memorizing different songs and stuff like that. And one of the things you got to get used to is spending more time on the front side listening to the songs, thinking about their structures, thinking about how a song moves from the intro to the verse to the bridge, you know, analyzing whether or not there's anything about that particular song that might be giving you any issues. You know, you don't identify those things when you're just listening to the song. Sometimes you do, but sometimes it's after you're done listening to it and you think about it and you're like, well, if I was sitting here right now and I wanted to think about that song, kind of driving through that song, so to speak, can I drive through it clearly? Or are there certain parts where I tend to get lost? Oh, I forgot there's a there's a break there, or I forgot um I don't play here, or I forgot there's a solo there, or whatever it might be. So there are so many aspects to listening that you can work on when you're not around your guitar. You know, oftentimes when I'm driving, I'll spend, you know, that's when I'll listen to songs and things like that and start developing plans in my mind of how the song goes, how the structure goes, not chords and all that sort of thing, just kind of overarching what it what is the song. Then I can get to the the details of that song. What am I hearing? Am I hearing major chords or minor chords or a certain chord progression or something like that? Or, you know, does the song require more melody in a solo, or is it more of a groove thing? There's so many things that you can do on a listening level that can be very beneficial to you that don't just require you to put your hands on the guitar. Okay, another thing I want you to think about is developing patience, patience with your practice, patience with you know, yourself and grace, giving yourself a little bit of you know, grace when you're practicing and when you're learning, and not just expecting that things are going to move a certain way when you're practicing. Sometimes things take time. And so having patience in practice, you know, when I when I talk to people about the academy, one of the things we talk about is the importance of understanding that we develop long-term game plans, and then we have short-term kind of, it's like slicing through multi-layers of long-term game plans, long-term skill development, long-term theory, long-term uh fretboard development, these sorts of things. You know, things that are going to take time. And then being able to slice through all that, kind of like just taking a piece of cake out, and then developing these things in a short term so we can actually use them to learn how to develop confidence and skill sets that we can use right now to jam with other people or whatever it might be. But all of these things that we're talking about, you've got to give yourself a level of grace and you've got to give yourself the ability of having patience with the development of these things. Some things take time, some things we can bat out really quick, and that's great, but some things take time, and that's what that's something that we got to get used to. Another thing to think about is consistency. Okay, I always tell people practice on the days that you eat. And the reason I say that is not just to be funny, but because that consistency is what gets you where you want to go. Practicing two or three times a week is great, but in all honesty, in my personal opinion, I'd rather have you practice a little less every day and practice every day instead of just practicing, you know, like three hours one day and then you take four days off. It's that consistency that's very important. You need to keep your thought processes fresh. You need to keep rethinking about that. When you go to bed, you know, things kind of reset in your mind. You know, you need to be able to get up and hit that again and re-remind yourself, oh, this is what I was doing, or this is how this goes, or this is how this feels, or whatever that that might be. And so the consistency of not only the practice, but the consistency of the thought process and thinking through things, right? How something goes, what something looks like, what something sounds like. Again, that listening thing we were talking about, but coming back to that on a regular basis is very important. The other thing I want you to think about is just proper mindset. Okay. Not every day is great. Some days suck. You know, some days when you practice, you get really frustrated. You have to be okay with that. You have to have a positive mindset that even on those frustrating days, you're motivated, you're excited. Okay. It doesn't mean that it's it's uh emotions sometimes have less to do with productivity than than you might think. And so, you know, just because you're having a frustrating day doesn't mean that it can't be motivating to you. Sometimes when I'm frustrated, I have a better day. It's just I, in terms of its productivity, maybe I don't feel like something is coming together, but I'm in the trenches, I'm in the in the mud, and I'm doing the work. And sometimes that's really important, even though I, you know, I'm frustrated that day something isn't working the way that I want it to. The goal is I don't give up. I have a couple of options. Either I dive deeper into that to figure out what I need to do or how to develop something, or I might need to step away from it and take another approach. Maybe that day is a good day to do this instead of this. You know, I always tell people that there's a significant difference between being smart with your time and being lazy. Lazy says I don't want to do this, so I'm not gonna do it. Smart means I really want to do this, but it's not productive today. I'm it I'm not feeling it. It's not working today. So instead of just going to war with it, what I'd rather do is sidestep it for today and work on something else that I am feeling. These are the two options you always have. You either don't say that and you go in head first because you need to attack this thing and you need to develop it. You see, that's where that having that proper mindset is really important. Um, but the other thing is there's days when it might be more productive to move away from that and try something else. I always think like some days are more technically, you know, the some days are better for me to attack my technique and things like that. A, I'm in the right mindset, B, it's really necessary. Like all those things are are are true. But there are some days when I might decide that today isn't a good technique day, even though I wish it was. Today is going to be a creative day, or today I'm gonna explore my fretboard more, or today I'm gonna study more theory, or you know, whatever it might be. There's there's a there's a ton of different kinds of approaches that I can take. But I think what happens a lot of times is when people think about practice, it's very one-dimensional. Like, you know, I wake up and I, you know, practice this exercise and I do this. Again, nothing wrong with that. I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. I'm just I'm just saying sometimes it doesn't fit in the box, and you have to think outside that box and go, what do I need to work on today that would be equally as productive, but in a different way. Okay. Another thing would be confidence, developing confidence in yourself. Okay oftentimes I tell students that there's there's more value in quality than there is in quantity. Just because you know a lot of theory or you know a lot of skills or something, and again, all of that is good. I'm not saying any of it is is bad. I'm just saying if you had less of those things, but when you went to play, it you play with confidence, you play with absolution in your ability of being able to do the things that you're doing. Maybe you don't know as much as somebody else, or maybe your fingers don't move as fast as somebody else. Again, those are personal things, long-term, short-term, all that kind of stuff that we we develop. But, you know, if we if we think about a BB King or a David Gilmore or an Eric Clapton or of again, it whatever it is you like, it doesn't matter who it is. Some people have a little more of this skill than other people, and some people have a little bit more of this ability than somebody else, whatever it might be. It isn't a contest of just how smart you are or how fast you are or whatever these things are. It's how how confident are you in the skills that you've got, because you do have time to continue to develop more skills or enhance the skills that you already have. But the goal is to develop confidence in yourself, develop this absolute confidence in yourself. So when you get around other musicians or you jump up on stage, you don't feel terrified because you you you you don't have confidence in your abilities. You know, every day I wake up, there are a million things that I could get better at as a guitar player, and I'm gonna do that, okay? But I can't just focus on that and only that. What I need to focus on is my ability of being able to deal with a particular situation, okay, and develop my confidence in that particular situation. So if I'm gonna jam with some guys that are, you know, or some players that are gonna be more rock, what kind of skill set do I have to work with that? Or if I'm gonna develop, if I'm gonna go jam with some people that are playing a little bit more jazz, what what is my skill set of being able to do that? And so if I can build these pillars of confidence, I can work with that and I can go out and actually live in the real world and play with other people. See, that's really important. Again, the long-term plays, I'm gonna keep getting better at these things. But I always tell people, you know, what I don't want you to do is wait until you develop all of these long-term plays before you finally get out in the real world and start making music with other musicians because you're gonna be dead by then. The guitar is a never-ending stream of information and opportunity. It just never ends. There's so many things we could do on the guitar. We can't wait until all of that is done before we go, okay, now I'm ready. Now I know everything. You can't do that. You see, that's why that long-term and short-term thing is so important. Okay. The other thing that I want you to think about is just being careful with letting go of comparisons. Okay. To live in a world where you're constantly comparing yourself to 50 billion people on YouTube and all this sort of thing is not productive. If you find that it's motivating to you to do certain things like that, I think that's wonderful. But if you're just always thinking you're not good enough, you always have to remind yourself some of these people that you're seeing A, have been playing forever, right? Or had opportunities where they could practice way more than you ever could, um, or were in a situation where, you know, their family or their surroundings or their financial means or a million other things could make this more viable for them. Again, I have no idea. I'm just saying the problem is the comparison thing can be very detrimental to you because you're always thinking you're not good enough. And being someone who has posted a lot of social media stuff myself, I know, you know, you're seeing the best of what we have when we post things. We're not posting our terrible practices. We're not posting our terrible performances, right? We don't want you to see all that stuff. We want you to see the best of the stuff. So you, you know, you might be watching take number 18, where the first 17 were terrible, right? So now you're thinking, oh man, it's just, you know, that guy can just whatever. Again, I'm not saying that sometimes, you know, wonderful things don't happen spontaneously the first time. I'm just saying in the real world, everybody practices, even the people that you look up to. You got to spend time with it, you got to keep working on these things, and they need to do the same thing as well. So give yourself a girl some grace again. You know, don't worry about that comparison so much. So, anyway, I just wanted to kind of get you in the right mindset of some other things to think about when it comes to practice, when it comes to uh preparing yourself for practice, or even maybe practice. This is the practice, right? It isn't just grabbing your guitar, but it's it's all these other things that you could be doing to get yourself ready. Um, you know, think of guitar as layers, like there's the skill set, the actual execution of things on the guitar that requires your fingers on the fretboard. That's what it is. But then there's fretboard development and fretboard comprehension. How do things work? How do things connect? All that kind of stuff. And then there's theory. How do things work? How, what, what, what is this? How does this relate to this? What are these things? And for me, most importantly, from there is how does that stuff relate to me and what I do on the fretboard? Not just theory is theory, so I understand this stuff and so I'm smart and all that sort of thing. That's great. But if it's not feeding your guitar playing, if it's not feeding your journey, what is it doing? Is it just information out here that makes us smart? And again, that's okay if that's true, but wouldn't it be great if that information was actually practical and it actually made us make, you know, comprehend what we're doing more? Wouldn't that be even more beneficial? I call it real world theory, practical, real things that we can use. Whether we're playing over blues or rock or country or metal or jazz or major or minor or whatever it might be, what's some things that we can do to use that theory in a real way? See, those are multi-layers. And then for me, the the final layer is musicality, creativity. Okay, not just scales and solos and triads and arpeggios and intervals and again, all good stuff. But the music isn't there. Those are those are vehicles to get us to the music, but the music inherently isn't there. It's our ability to take all of this stuff and squeeze music out of these opportunities. That's a that's a thing you have to learn as well. You know, just because you're getting smarter and you're learning more skills doesn't mean you have more musicality. It just means you have a lot of opportunities for musicality because you understand these things, but you still got to figure out how to actually create the music. So these are things I just want you to think about. All right. If you would be interested in exploring this stuff more, you can always check out the Guitar Zoom Academy and have a conversation with me or one of my other instructors. We can tell you all about this and how it works and what we can do for you and how we could work together. All right. So stay positive, keep practicing, and I'll talk to you soon.