Don't die plz. Also check out the pinned video "How Good is 52 Week Guitar Player Actually" for more information about the program. We are closed for enrollment but will re-open in mid-December. We will only accept 100 new students
Yo Brandon! You mentioned studies… I’m a holistic nutritionist and health coach who really enjoys digging into the peer reviewed scientific literature on these topics! Also a semi professional jazz guitarist in Kansas City, Missouri. From the science, the single biggest predictor of success and being able to stick to things long term is social support. When people have families that change their eating habits with them and friends that don’t tear them down, they are much more likely to succeed. Even more so if the culture of people they associate with is accommodating and doing similar things! Applying this to guitar, it could mean trying to make friends and building community with other musicians by going to jam sessions, participating in online groups, etc. I know for me, the more jam sessions I go to, the more pumped I feel about digging into the next thing musically! If you’d like more details about the science so you can make a more compelling argument, feel free to get a hold of me! 2 of my favorite topics are wellness and music! If you’d like to DM me for my email, my socials will be down below. IG: level_up_wellness101 Facebook: Level up wellness RU-vid: umm… I’m here 😂🙋🏽♂️
Doc here, also mediocre guitarist who appreciates you and tries to not PISS YOU OFF! Here's a study for your argument www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3379767/
Theoretical explanations for maintenance of behaviour change: a systematic review of behaviour theories. I believe RU-vid ate my comment with the link so hope this one sticks. As an aspiring physiotherapist I can absolutely relate to the difficulty changing and maintaining lifestyle and habits.
It’s not really surprising, really. The bigger and harder an objective/habit is, the easier it is to rationalize yourself and find excuses to procrastinatinate on it (it’s important to always have in mind procrastination is a response to fear or anxiety, not laziness). So something like "do all these 20 things or you’ll die" is easy to ignore because you’ll see it as a "all or nothing" deal, so it’s easy to excuse yourself out of it "no time to cook, kids don’t like it, no market nearby" or whatever. If instead you suggest itterative, small improvements "replace your evening crisps with a carrot, eat an apple instead of biscuits between meals", it becomes harder to procrastinate out of, because it’s less daunting. And whenever people want to create a new habit, they tend to go to an extreme which is super easy to procrastinate out of. "I’ll run 40 mins a day", "I’ll read 100 pages a day", "I’ll do an hour of guitar a day", which leads to "oh well, I only have 20 minutes of free time right now, guess I can’t run", or, "it’s raining outside, guess I’m gonna ignore the dozens of possible exercsises that are doable at home and watch tv instead". Plus this constant self-loathing which comes out of procrastinating makes you less eager to do it the next time. That’s why people who start saying "I’ll read a few pages a day" end up creating a stronger habit on average in the long run. Lately, when someone asks "can I learn guitar with only 15mins a day", I’m more and more tempted to say yes, because these people will eventually trick themselves into liking guitar that way, and end up doing more naturally. There’s also the fact that people push their boundaries too far, maybe out of ego, or impatience. That’s why you see so many people wanting to play Fantaisie Impromptue after 6 months, spending 5 months to do barely anything with it, and end up averse to pushing out of their comfort zone, where the learning really happens. People will, by path of least resistance, be more happy to do whatever their comfortable with, playing a scale at a pace that is pretty easy to them and doesn’t provide much learning, absent-mindedly practicing stuff without a goal, because they’re doing everything to avoid the least bit of uncomfortableness, even though 10 mins of deliberate practice is much more efficient than re-doing stuff without intent (it’s also much more exhausting and mentally draining, so it doesn’t help people into doing them) for 30mins. And that aversion to uncomfortableness will lead people into searching for the perfect conditions to step into that territory (to keep the running analogy, they’re waiting for the clear skies, temperature not too hot or too cold, with no aching in any joint or muscle, no soreness, no dog poop on the street, etc), which, obviously, will never happen. I think people are too scared of accepting the fact that they’ll never be 100% efficient, but that just a bit here and there will add up much more than doing nothing waiting for the day you can reach 100% efficiency. They’re waiting for the stars to line up to reach a point where there’ll be no effort to be done to eat healthy, instead of eating just 0.5% healthier every day, and letting it compound. Social media and the internet doesn’t help on that (not a diss on this channel, to be clear), they make it seem like everyone is perfect and got everything figured out the first time and never struggled to figure out what works for them, that you either figure it out magically (you have "talent"), or that you’ll never ever figure it out. And you have all these million followers influencers with crisp and down to the second routines when they wake up, and you feel like an idiot for not being like them. Besides that, the wealth of videos and people to talk to out there make it easy to avoid doing actual work while at the same time managing to feel accomplished... having done nothing. You’ll have people watch a 20min video on a technique or a song, patting themselves in the back instinctually, feeling they’ve done something, and then 6 month down the road feel like shit and worthless because they don’t progress as much as they want and actually they don’t have much time to do guitar each day (despite having time to watch 20min long videos) so maybe they should just quit. Between uncomfortableness and fun watching a video on guitar, which will people choose instinctually? Path of least resistance again. That’s why you have people with 3000 posts on language learning forums, who became experts on fighting other people’s learning methods and which one is best, but actually haven’t gotten good in any language themselves. Getting in internet fight is easy, being alone in silence in front of a book (which needs a lot of focus, especially at first, especially in a foreign language).. not so much. Anyway, for people who somehow made it this far, and are confused by my paragraph long analogies, here actionable actions you can take to put it in practice: Take one small thing you struggle with. The tiniest, the better. Spider exercise, a chord you can kinda get right but not 100% of the time, a chord that’s slightly harder than those you can do so far, a new scale shape, etc. In my case, I’ll take "practicing with metronome", because it’s a common case. Take a scale shape you know (or even practice on just a single note if you’re not that acquinted with scales yet, the more familiarity the better), and play it with metronome, quarter notes for first. Put a timer for 5 minutes, and actually focus throughout these 5 minutes, no auto-piloting (if you can auto-pilot and do it well while your mind wanders, it means what you’re doing is too easy, and probably not giving you much gains). Take a minute or two break, if you did it right and were truly focused, it probably fatigued you more than you think it’d have. Then do it again. Depending on many factors (the time you have, etc), you can do another exercise that way, treat yourself to a song you already know, learn a new song etc (learning songs is generally a good idea anyway, the more you know the bigger your vocabulary, any song that isn’t so easy you can sight read it is worth learning, imo). Then do it tomorrow, and the day after, for a week, you’ll see that terrifying thing that was mentally draining you is becoming more and more comfortable to you. Start mixing other small exercises like that, or complexifying them when they’re becoming auto-pilotable (go from quarters to eights in my example, etc), eventually, you’ll learn to be not as afraid of the uncomfortableness, because you became more confident in your ability to overcome it. Your ability to focus and attention span probably started growing as well. Congratulations, you now know how to get good at virtually anything in life, and have aquired the knowledge that hundreds of self-help books are trying to sell you for inane prices. Ah, fun small tip I like, put your guitar on your bed after you wake up, it forces you to pick it up once after waking up, and once before bedtime, maybe that’ll push you enough to want to mess with it a bit, even for 5 minutes, even unplugged 😉
Ah yeah, also (I have way too much to say about that topic sorry), I believe this is in part why babies learn so fast. Yeah, brain plasticity and all, sure, okay. But also babies don’t care if they sound like shit or struggle or fall or tumble. They’ll try to start walking, tumble on their bottom and laugh it out, and then try again. They’re not telling themselves "omg do I not have tallent for walking??? I saw a tiktok influencer walking at 2 months so I’m a good for nothing surely" and having existential crises about their mistakes (well, sometimes they do, often by mimicking their parents, but a good parent should help them through it). They also don’t care if their piano is a casio toy or has semi-weighted keys or hammer action or is a goddamn steinway, they’ll have fun punching the keys, doing a cacauphony of cluster chords and they’ll just be living their best life anyway. As dumb as they are, we can learn a lot from them!
People often don't get better because of two things - ego and time. Ego- People plateau with their playing because what they know serves them as much as they want. And time. The idea of practising for 8 hours a day, every day, scares them. The idea of committing that much time and effort seems incredulous. Then they get scared off with the idea that they must learn theory and that because theory is a "language," they think of it like learning German or French. It's more maths than language. I always tell people to try to find ten minutes a day, not half an hour a day. That way, it is less of a time dedication, and the theory is if you can find 10 minutes to practice and you're enjoying it, then don't stop after 10 minutes! Anyone who has played for long enough will tell you "just picking up the guitar for 10 minutes for practice" will become an hour soon enough. Also, the theory is that if you're not enjoying it, then you have only lost ten minutes. But dedicated practice isn't meant to be fun - well, not entirely. A full, error free performance is the reward for dedicated practice. Even if it is one song.
i appreciate your vids, and your way of teaching. playing guitar kept sane. when one is driven they can go far. life has a way of.. getting in the way. like i had to get a "real job" so i could move out of my dad's house, but my job consumes my life basically and i dont have all the time i used to to practice and write songs. i really like my job, but i really miss performing and playing with other musicians. as ya get older things like your health become more important. i just wish.. idk that things were different idk🤷♂️
been at it for a year, and as expected i still suck. people like you serve as constant motivation to keep me sticking to it, and to see how far i’ve really come.
So true , 30 minutes a day helps me. Usually turns into an hour. I like to jam. Dietary nutrition is the way , you can workout all you want , but if you don't watch your diet your going nowhere. Thanks for the guitar lessons.
I don't think he's talking about just playing guitar, but rather changing the way you play and practice. People enjoy playing their way the same way people like eating their way, and playing or practicing something unnatural to you but would make you better is the same as dieting in a way you dislike
Eh, depends, some people don't care about anything/aren't capable of making real changes that require discipline. Personally music is the most important thing for me, it's my dream to be a musician, so in a sense my life (or at least the life I want) is at stake if I don't become good enough. So I try very hard to practice consistently and push myself, of course, i'm human, I make mistakes, but I always try to get back on track on improve my discipline
The thing is you’re comparing something that a person typically does voluntarily with something they’re being told they need to do. There’s a similar hump when the fun wears off, but since with guitar you have the advantage of them starting happily, you can more easily motivate them to get over the frustrating bumps. Whereas with something like a diet, they probably just think “I don’t even want to be fucking doing this, I’m out.”
People do what they love to do. People do what makes them happy, that's just a fact. I am 68 years old, I started playing guitar 20 years ago and now I would say I'm not too shabby at it. I didn't't learn by working at it or even by "practicing", I learned because I loved having a guitar in my hands and making a slightly better sound each day. If you want to play guitar then fall in love with it and you will 👍
I’m pretty bad at it. Been playing for almost 5 years and I would say I’m still in the beginner intermediate stage with a few pro skills. I have gone through stages of depression and have anxiety and overall just been scared to grow and learn. Trying to change that one step at a time. I am gonna be a great guitar player one day in a hopefully very big meaningful band! Don’t rain on my parade😂
The hardest part of learning guitar is knowing what & how to practice and how long that will take to see gains. Its easy to stick with it when the gains come. I think most people dont stick with it because its harder than they thought and takes longer than they expected it to.
I think there was some study that proved that humans are much more likely to change their behaviour for others than for themselves. Like if a family member gets some kind of condition or their pet has some special needs
I had bad bloodwork. Doctor told me to change. I could tell he didn't think I would. I did!!! Does that make me more likely to stick to guitar if I actually got a teacher and didn't just try to learn from youtube shorts?
Ppl dont know what guitar does for us Im sure u ppl nevee heard of sam Langford but hes one of the greatest boxers to ever live infact the best boxers of his time avoided him like the plague 178 with 124 of them by knock outwins 30 losses he died with nothing to show for it lost everything even his eye sight but hed quoted saying I still got my guitar and my memories so im ok
I was gonna give up playing too, but my dad said if I get decent at the acoustic guitar, he would buy me an electric. I’m happy to say I can play the full intro to one by Metallica on my acoustic.
If I were to sum up guitar in one phrase it would be “JUST DO IT” So many times I’m like “eh I’ll learn that scale later” when I in fact need to just do it.
This ties in nicely to the 52 week program you have😂 But seriously it depends on what the person's goal is. I just want a nice hobby to grow. Not be a professional
Heh Heh Heh, "Truth Man", People's Are Creatures Of Habit , Fads, Going along with others say so without putting themselves out there or into whatever, follow the leaders like sheep, and they quit too easily or excuses and excuses, but hey not everything is for everybody !!! 🆒👍🎸🤘🎼☺️🇺🇸🙏 DDH 10-28-2023
