Back in my original playing days all I really did was learn songs and play them in a band. A lot of the time it was cover songs but sometimes I even wrote my own songs or collaborated with friends to produce a tune. Apart from learning the odd scale that’s really all I did back in those days. Admittedly I did have a rather extensive repertoire of songs that I could play but then again I had all the time in the world to build that up. On top of that I was jamming and gigging on a regular basis.
Despite now being at the end of my 3rd year of my return to playing guitar, and even though I definitely know more music theory than I did as a kid and might even do some things technically better than I did then, I definitely feel like I am meandering a bit with no clear goals or direction. I often find myself noodling the same stuff over and over again, rarely pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Sometimes I watch the odd random YouTube lesson and get momentarily inspired but that spark always seems to fade and then in time I forgot whatever that random thing was that I learnt.
Dabbling with practise routines
Over the past few years I have dabbled occasionally with writing out a proper practise routine and laying out what I wanted to do and that’s something that on those occasions I did actually have some success with. However without clear goals these practise routines went the same way as those random things I learnt on YouTube and fizzled out after a few weeks. No doubt they were effective but I lacked consistency.
In my late 20s and early 30s, I was very much a goal driven person. I lived and breathed personal development and that’s how I made progress in different areas of my life. When I started playing guitar again it never occured to me that those personal development lessons could and should be applied to my playing guitar. I recently watched a video series from the amazing Justin Sandercoe about effective practise and he brought these concepts to a guitar context. One of the things he talked about was setting goals which got me thinking about my own guitar related goals. More importantly he made me realise that I didn’t really have any guitar based goals other than some vague notions of one day playing in a band again.
As Justin so perfectly states in his video, despite being improved what I lacked was a sense of accomplishment.
Types of goals
Justin talks about 2 types of goals. The first is the big picture goal. This could be as simple as just wanting to learn a few acoustic songs to play at a party. Or it could be that you want to gig on a regular basis. Whatever the goal, the path to achieving it will be different and it’s this path that forms the second type of goal. These are the goals that must be achieved in order to move towards that overall goal. In essence he is talking about long term and short term goals. What do you want to do and what do you need to do in order to achieve it?
Rather obviously Justin’s first suggestion is to sit down and work out what that overall long term goal is. What is the one big thing that you really want to work towards achieving? I think it’s important to note that this big goal can and most likely will change over time. As you work towards something and begin to make progress towards that thing then you might discover that either it’s not really what you want to do or you might find that the path you are on leads you to another path. The important thing is to have that initial goal.
Deciding what to focus on
For me I do ultimately want to gig again (current global pandemic aside) and in the future I would like to be gigging regularly at weekends. However I thought a little bit more about this and while regular gigging is definitely an endgame of sorts there is something very specific that I would like to achieve in the “middle” term before getting there. I love blues guitar. As much as I love metal and rock and pretty much anything guitar based I have this love of blues and blues rock that I think stems from growing up in a town that has a world famous blues festival every year. When I was playing guitar as a kid I was very much a metal head and I never really got too into the blues thing. I did enjoy some Hendrix and SRV but that was about as far as it went. As I have got back into guitar my love of blues has basically exploded.
I recently found out that the aforementioned blues festival has an open mic night every year and I would love to be able to get up at that and play a set of 4 or 5 blues songs. As I thought more about the regular gigging goal I realised that while this is something I ultimately want to be doing, I’d love to do the blues thing first. Once I arrived at this decision it kind of became a no brainer that this is what I should be working towards.
Putting aside things not related to the goals
Now the downside to this is that I’ll be stepping away from some of the things that I’ve been dabbling with in recent months. This includes things like learning some John Frusciante guitar parts, dabbling with some metal songs from my youth, and other non-blues related guitar things. It is hard to know what way the world is going to be if and when the next blues festival comes around so it is hard to know when I will be able to really fulfill this goal but that shouldn’t stop this from being something I can focus on. The longer term goal is still to be doing regular gigs in a cover band so I will be swinging back round to those non-blues things in due course.
The real reason for this goal
Another reason I’d like this to be a goal is my dad. He and I are fans of guitar music and have been to the blues festival loads of times. We’ve been to a lot of concerts together (all guitar based) over the years. He never came to see me play when I was younger as the music I played wasn’t really something he enjoyed. I’d love to play a blues set for him. It would mean a lot to him and to me and this more than anything else is the real reason why I want this to be my overall goal for the medium term.
Short term goals
So now with the medium and long term goals established it is time to think about the shorter term goals. The things that, if achieved, will move me closer to my medium and long term goals.
In setting short term goals Justin talks about how having a guitar teacher can be helpful in this respect and it is also no coincidence that the person I specifically wanted to get as my guitar teacher happens to be one of the best blues guitarists in the country. In fact, the night I asked him if he’d be open to giving me lessons it was at a special blues night that he himself was putting on.
I am in the the second year of doing lessons and while he has helped me a lot I haven’t really said where I wanted to go with things and as such we have tried a few different things.
Towards the end of last year and for the start of this year we were focusing on doing the guitar grades and that was what we worked on for the most part. The pandemic stopped lessons for a while and now that we are back at them the grade stuff has fallen to the wayside as we’ve gravitated back towards learning music theory with a blues favour. That was already happening before I even set down to write this post so I guess at the back of my head this is the thing I have wanted to do without ever acknowledging it to myself. Or if i had said it I did so and like all things allowed it to fizzle out.
Something that I have found success with recently is taking what he has shown me and expanding upon it using Justin’s Sandercoes website. My teacher was actually taught by Justin at the London Guitar Academy so there is some overlap there anyway. I don’t want to over complicate things or overwhelm myself so really it’s about keeping it to a few reliable sources despite the wealth of information available on the internet.
At the time of writing this post we are working on dominant 7th arpeggios in relation to music theory as well as working on my vibrato technique. I actually thought my vibrato was ok but thanks to his guidance I realise that it was, in fact, atrocious.
The music theory lessons are intended to help me learn to improvise over blues chord progressions. The technical topics are to help me play as good as him.
Learning songs
Something he and I specifically have said we will not do is learn songs together. He feels I am more than capable of learnings songs on my own and I agree. We tried this but it just didn’t work for me. I am not able to learn songs by someone telling me what frets to play as I sit there. I like to listen to a recording and then use a combination of my ear and YouTube videos to help me work my way through a song. I’d happily sit for 2 or 3 hours at a time working on one part of a song until I’m happy with it. That would be a very expensive guitar lesson.
However I do need to learn songs because ultimately I want to play songs. I have in my possession several Lick Library video series each focusing on a different band or artist. These have been sitting on my computer with the intention that I would one day learn the songs from them but I simply have not done that yet. With this medium term goal now in place I can make use of these, especially considering one is focused on Rory Gallagher and another on Stevie Ray Vaughan. At this time I am learning Back in Black off the Lick Library AC/DC video series that I have. Angus plays a lot of blues licks using the major and minor pentatonic scales so while not strictly blues I do feel learning some of these songs will help me on this journey. I think working my way through these will help me massively towards achieving my goals.
Some YouTube love?
It won’t be enough for me just to be able to play these songs along with the album tracks. I have already learnt the first Back in Black solo and I thought it sounded fine until I played it over a backing track rather than over the album track. It sounded awful. It might be enough to work on these songs and learn them over backing tracks until I am happy with them but I have decided to raise the difficulty level a bit. I’d like to learn each and every song from these 3 video series (AC/DC, Rory and SRV), to then record myself playing them, and to post them to YouTube. Getting these songs to enough of a standard for me to record will encourage me to work on them harder. These videos will also act as a record that I can look back on over time to, hopefully, see my progression as a guitarist.
And there we have it. My short, medium and long term goals
This is a long post I know and was definitely more for my own benefit than anyone else’s but the process of writing it helped me iron out what I want to achieve with the guitar. Next up I plan to write a post on putting together a practise routine to support these goals so stay tuned for that.
Photo by Yabee Eusebio from Pexels
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