What Are Your Weaknesses Options

[Daniel Robinson]

Everyone always wants to be the best they can be, but as humans we tend to play to our strengths and ignore our weaknesses.

The same holds true for guitar playing, do you know what your weaknesses are as a player? I would assume most of you know where you are weak in your playing.

I would ask you all.

What are your weak spots in your playing and what can we do to help you overcome them?

Some weaknesses are relatively simple to correct, some are very difficult but until we admit to what we have to work on we will continue to ignore them and our goal of mastering the instrument will become very difficult and frustrating.


I will go first and tell you all that my legato technique is not what it should be, i tend to use my picking skills as a crutch in alot of circumstances. Don't get me wrong i can play legato but its not as smooth as i would like it to be so i have set aside time in my practicing schedule to really get down and dirty to put this problem area to rest.

I have started working on just strengthening my fingers doing trills and hammer on drills, to facilitate this i have also put 12's on my second guitar so i have to work harder to acheive the legato sound in the end i think i will make my fingers alot stronger. Even the last few days i have done this i have seen remarkable increase in finger strength.

Daniel

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[jacmoe]

Excellent topic, Daniel!

My weakness is that I have been playing the guitar for so many years without actually playing it.

Since I joined GMC it feels like those years are compressed into weeks.

I bought a Korg PD4 when I joined.
Which is a blessing!
I am totally hooked on it.
I use it for everything: AP, timing, legato, improvising, scales, arpeggios; even as backing track for the GMC lessons.
It's great!
I alternate between regular metronome and rythm tracks.

I know not to stop.. Damn you, Muris!

What I mean is:
My biggest weakness is being lazy.
And I know that I must find an enjoyable way of practicing to overcome it.
The Pandora does that for me, which is why I use it.

Maybe someday I will practice without it.. Who knows?

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This post has been edited by jacmoe: Jun 13 2008, 09:17 PM

[Daniel Robinson]

Excellent topic, Daniel!

My weakness is that I have been playing the guitar for so many years without actually playing it.

Since I joined GMC it feels like those years are compressed into weeks.

I bought a Korg PD4 when I joined.
Which is a blessing!
I am totally hooked on it.
I use it for everything: AP, timing, legato, improvising, scales, arpeggios; even as backing track for the GMC lessons.
It's great!
I alternate between regular metronome and rythm tracks.

I know not to stop.. Damn you, Muris!

What I mean is:
My biggest weakness is being lazy.
And I know that I must find an enjoyable way of practicing to overcome it.
The Pandora does that for me, which is why I use it.

Maybe someday I will practice without it.. Who knows?

Jacmoe,

Alot of guitarists suffer from this form of laziness, i know i did. The problem is learning enough stuff so you can actually play something and not do boring excersises is the allure. You definately have to sacrifice alot of free time to practice to get anywhere meaningful with the guitar, its not an easy thing.

Even Muris was a beginner at the beginning, struggling and thinking that he might not be able to do it. But he pushed on and look what he can do now. It takes dedication to perfection.

Daniel

I cant seem to make things up. of course i dont know to many things but still haha

Composistion is another aspect of playing guitar that is hard to define really. Its a skill that takes as much dedication as learning all the ins and outs on the guitar. Imo music composistion is one of the most difficult forms of expression, because the canvas that you are writing on is abstract. Humans tend to be almost totally visual when it comes to expression, to be able to compose art with sound requires alot of abstract thinking. You have to find your own style of doing it.

Me personally i tend to approach writing on the guitar in a very elemental way, what i mean by this is that some people when they write a song try to write; happy, or sad, or angry. (nothing wrong with that btw) but i like to try to write more about natural elements that may sound happy, or sad, or angry as an example. But i dont set out trying to make it sound that way.

For instance, i might be sitting on my back porch during a summer thunderstorm, and i try to write on the guitar what that storm is like, the cadence of the rain, the highs and lows of the thunder the wind etc. I try to really dig into what the storm means to me internally, how it makes me feel but at the same time i am really trying to describe in a musical context that storm from the point of view OF the storm rather than someone visualizing the storm from their own point of view.

Daniel

Another one of mine, Sticking to learning something. I dont always have the desire to play through a whole lesson regardless of how awesome it is. If there is a lick I cant get down, I often give up.

This is a difficulty all of us face, there are still things i can't do and don't put in the time to learn it. But don't let it discourge you, because even if you don't learn the whole lesson, you still have learned something. Even if its only 1 lick out of 20 its still better than 0 out of 20. If you are willing to push yourself to your limits you will improve, more often than not i have found that if i push myself to learn something that is a little (or alot in some cases) out of my playing limits i may feel at first like i failed, but at the same time i find that alot of the things that i could play with a little difficulty almost become too easy because of shooting for something tougher, you may not always see the benefits right away but they are there if you look for them.

Daniel

My main weakness is my pinky speed. It's stopping me speeding up on every other technique because i can't move my fingers fast enough.

Ooops didnt mean to skip ya there Matt23, got lost heh.


Pinky speed is the toughest thing to work on, my suggestion for improving pinky speed is to work directly on strengthing that finger by doing trill drills.

Choose a place that is comfortable on the neck for you to play on, and just trill between ring finger and pinky, at first just choose a speed that you can maintain for a decent amount of time, keep the trill speed even and just do it for a full minute, every day try to make it a bit faster but maintain for a full minute. The biggest thing to overcome with your pinky is just its strength to fret a note.

Also when doing the trill make the movement as small as you can while still getting a clean tone, i.e. dont do "Fly away fingers". Conservation of motion is key to playing fast.

Daniel

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