It Gets Easier As You Advance

That’s right. So let me explain what I mean when I say this. I don’t know where you are at right now whether you are a beginner, intermediate or advanced level but if you are reading this then chances are you are a beginner or an intermediate.

You may be practicing a lot, you may be practicing in the right way, and practicing the right things if you are taking lessons with a decent teacher. But you may be struggling right now, you may have been working on something for quite a while and you have been struggling for a while. Whether you are struggling with a particular part of the song, an element of your technique, memorising a scale or ear training or whatever it is you are working on you are stuck.

And now self-doubt is creeping in your mind. “maybe I really can’t do this after all” “my friend has been playing for 5 months and is making huge progress while I have been playing for years and have been going nowhere” or here is the most incorrect one “If I’m struggling now, imagine what it will be like when I get to the intermediate and advanced level. I can’t do this”

But do not worry. For I have some good news. Okay, good news and bad news:

Playing guitar is not like school where it is easy in the beginning and gradually gets harder. The first year of school is about as hard as finger painting with the right colours and it gets harder and harder until you get to university. With guitar it doesn’t work like that. It works the opposite way.

The hardest part is the very beginning. In the beginning, it hurts to play, it sounds terrible when you play, you can’t play anything correctly right now. When you play chords, they sound awful and you can’t go from 1 chord to another chord smoothly. Once you get good at the 3 string chords and doing chord changes with these chords, going to 4 string chords is not hard at all.

In other words, if you are a beginner, however frustrated you are and how hard it is now, it is not going to get any harder than this. Once you’ve been playing for 6 to 9 months you have already done the most difficult bit. 

If you are at the intermediate level or beyond that, realise that you have already done the hard part. So do not give up now. A breakthrough is going to come soon! It can come at any point.

With that being said, if you are doing this without a decent teacher you are going to find it hard to play the guitar well by yourself. You could end up playing for years maybe even decades and still be stuck at the beginner level or intermediate level at the most. Even if you reach your goals it could take years. If you get a decent teacher then one day you may suck, next day you can be a Rockstar.

About the author: If you are looking for guitar lessons in Exmouth then Jake Willmot is the teacher for you! Especially if you want to play metal guitar as that is what he specialises in. When he is not teaching you can often find him either writing his own songs or playing gigs if he is out. But more often than not Jake just likes to rock out.