Practical Guitar Lessons
Guitar Lessons You Can Use
If you are just starting out, then you may think this guitar lesson is premature. The topic of this guitar lesson is confidence. It is a lesson that I will hammer on over and over again in these guitar lessons. I am going to present for your consideration the notion that even before your first guitar lesson, it would be a good thing to try to land yourself some gigs.
‘Wait a minute’ you are thinking. ‘I don’t even know how to play yet; how can I play a gig.’
The answer is of course that you probably can’t do it very well, but you certainly can do it, and you will learn a lot - much more than you would learn if you went to an initial guitar lesson with an instructor. Also instead of paying a teacher, YOU may actually get paid. Don’t shoot for too high a fee in too primo a venue or you might get sued when and if you crash and burn. A birthday party at a friend’s house would be a good start - or even better at an enemy’s house.
Confidence plays a huge roll in success at playing guitar - even more so than guitar lessons. While this may be an exaggeration, I will stand by the notion that if you have enough confidence and NO guitar playing knowledge, you can perform better than someone with some guitar knowledge and no confidence.
You will probably not directly learn confidence in guitar lessons although it is true for most people that the more you know and the more you practice, the more confidence you will have. You can get confidence indirectly through guitar lessons, but you can also get it by attacking it directly.
One thing I’ve noticed at recitals in which many students file up on stage one by one to perform a chosen piece is that they are anywhere from well prepared to not at all prepared from the perspective of their instrument and their recital piece, but most are not at all prepared from the perspective of their confidence.
One student in particular was playing the drum set. His teacher played guitar, and the boy played the drums. From the start the poor kid was lost as to what to do. I could actually read his lips as he said ‘This one?’ or ‘This one?’ as he pointed to the various drums/cymbals of the drum kit. I felt like yelling out, ‘it’s the drums kid, just hit ‘em.’ Had he been my student and taking guitar lessons, I hope he would have been better prepared. Just hit them in any order with any rhythm at all, but with confidence.
If you can’t find gigs, don’t despair and go pay for guitar lessons. Set up on your front porch with your band mates and play a couple of sets. I used to set up on a friends porch when his neighbor had New Years Eve parties; we really sucked but the guests always clapped and looked happy to see us playing. Seriously, I had not had any guitar lessons at that point. You couldn’t even recognize the songs we were playing.
If you are taking guitar lessons, remember this: don’t get so caught up in the material from your guitar lesson that you bypass the opportunity to play with confidence. Think of confidence as your main goal and the guitar lesson material just as the medium in which you are demonstrating that confidence.
You can also visualize roll models -
I’ll end this guitar lesson by suggesting that a good guitar hero to emulate is the character Mendlebaum from the TV show Seinfeld. He was the old man played by Lloyd Bridges who tried to lift things over his head and who over estimated his own abilities, crying ‘It’s go time’ as he proceeded to throw his back out from attempting to lift a TV over his head. Keep that attitude in your head when you go to your next guitar lesson or if you are not taking guitar lessons, have that attitude when you play your next gig.
Thanks for checking out these guitar lessons. More later….
