If you want to be successful at anything, you have to take yourself seriously. But sometimes you can get so caught up in the details that you actually prevent yourself from moving forward.
This is especially true when it comes to improving guitar skills. It’s so tempting to compare your own skill level to the capabilities of other players that you can become distracted from your own goals.
Andrew from YouTube’s CreativeGuitarStudio channel makes just this point in his video “Are You Murdering Your Own Guitar Success?” the latest entry in his Guitar Blog Insider.
“You know, when guitar players get so hung up on how they’re doing at learning to play the guitar, they not only end up slowing down their level of progress but, even worse,” Andrew says, “they’ll begin hurting the main reason why they started to play guitar in the first place, which is, of course, to have fun.
“So in this episode of the Guitar Blog Insider, I want to discuss the idea of why some people kill their own success by getting way too hung up on how they’re doing. It’s a real killer of both motivation and for a person’s long-term guitar success.”
Andrew goes on to talk about the habits of successful guitarists. Some of the points he makes include:
“Those guitar players who have a lot of success with getting results out of their practice time are essentially the type of players who will stick to their goals,” he says. “They’re committed to the music that they’re learning, and they don’t overload themselves with dozen of different directions and choices. They have a method that they stick to, and they’re organized. They rely on themselves to keep a regular practice routine going, and they aren’t obsessed about their level of progress compared to anyone else.”
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“At the same time, they know that with more practice in the future, they can break through the ceiling that they’re at now and they can get even better than they are today. This is the attitude and the mindset of the successful guitar player.”
Check out the video for more details. As always, Andrew makes a lot of great points and offers plenty of advice.
Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
![[L-R] A composite image of Ron "Bumblefoot" Thal, Joel Hoekstra, Marty Friedman all taking a solo live: Bumblefoot plays his double-neck. Hoekstra has his white Les Paul Custom. Friedman wears a plaid shirt and plays his PRS signature model.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/VPKUYFpK9bsjnQdzekheeb-1280-80.jpg.webp)
