INTRODUCING COUNTERFLOWS 2016

One of the strangest problems you can have when you’re learning guitar is the issue of having too many options. When you first start out, you’ll probably pick up a few chords and pluck a couple of riffs. Maybe these were shown to you by your Uncle, a friend or a teacher – maybe you even found a free lesson online. You don’t really know what you’re doing and you just have to care about the couple things that have been shown to you. Easy and fun, but limited.

When you start to develop a bit and you’re ready move on by yourself, a big problem might strike you. You probably won’t encounter it at first, especially if there’s a song you really want to play. You’re going to focus on learning that and not care too much about other things. When you’ve picked up most of the information and skill you needed to play the things you loved before you started learning guitar, though, you’re going to want to deliberately expand your abilities.

How could that be a problem? It isn’t in itself, but you’ll suddenly find yourself in a situation where you have a literally endless list of things you’re able to tackle. You’re no longer a complete novice clinging to the two-or-three chords you Uncle showed you, the world of music and guitar is your oyster…

… If only you knew what to learn first.

Imagine (maybe you don’t have to imagine) there are so many things that you’re burning to learn that you just waste all your time trying to decide which to nail first. If you’ve never encountered this it might seem dumb but, trust me, almost everyone hits this wall. It’s happened to me more than once and I’m sure it will happen again, every single student I’ve had who’s made the step into being an “intermediate” player has hit this wall and every other professional guitarist I know has hit this wall at some point in their guitar playing career.

If you haven’t come across this in the context of learning guitar, here’s an analogy:

You’re at a restaurant and they serve five of your absolute favourite dishes. Each one you would just die to taste – but you can only afford one. How do you choose?

It’s the same when you start having options for what you want to learn. Maybe you want to learn a new favourite song, a new technique for soloing and you want to learn how chords are constructed. You will not perfect all three options if you flutter between them across a few days, you’ll have wasted your time making barely any progress – you can’t “afford” to choose all of them. You need to commit to one thing at a time and spend enough time on it to totally nail it.

How do you choose in this situation? There are a few methods.

The first method is probably the most logic-based way to pick your next challenge. Being honest with yourself, estimate how much time each option would take you. It’s OK to take a little shot at each option to get a rough idea of how tricky they’ll be and base your estimation on that. Then, just pick the one that will take the least time first. Why? Well, all three will take the same amount of time over all. If one takes 3 days, another takes 5 and the hardest takes 7 then you’re going to take 15 days total to learn all three things. However, if you choose the shortest first you’ll have fully learnt something new earlier than if you learnt one of the other options first. Besides the morale boost from a success coming more quickly, you might find that the time the other options would take has decreased because you’ve got a new skill or piece under your belt. This is my own personal most often used solution to the “option paralysis” brought on by having too many paths to take inlearning.

The second method isn’t as clear-cut and may not work as well for you, it just depends on whether or not you’re the kind of person who can do this. You’re going to need to ask yourself which options you could live without, which could you bear to pick to never learn at all? Hopefully, this leaves you with your real first pick for what to learn next!

The third option I’d suggest is to get your hands on an instructional book or video. These can structure your learning and, until the end of the book or video, take the issue of choice out of the equation. This is just like when you first start and have a teacher or family member/friend guiding you.

You do have to pick which instructional book/video to follow, though!

If the sound of an instruction book/video to help structure and speed up your learning sounds good to you, there are some available on this very website.

Let’s experiment with applying one of these solutions. As soon as you’re done learning whatever you’re working on right now, don’t just slide on to something else. Have a good think about your options and pick three or four things that would be good for you to try next. Then, apply the first method I gave you to decide the best order to learn them.

Even if you don’t come across these situations normally, this exercise will help you avoid hitting that brick wall of having so many choices you end up not learning anything!