Is Being Lazy the Key to Better Guitar Playing?

If you typically put in hours every week working on your guitar playing, you may sometimes feel like woodshedding is a chore.

Andrew Wasson of Creative Guitar Studio has what he thinks might be a better idea: Instead of making guitar practice work, why not make it fun?

Andrew says he noticed over his years of teaching guitar that kids have a more laid-back approach to learning the instrument and yet still succeed in learning.

“The reason kids tend to learn faster and better process all the performance-related areas of playing is they don’t care about their success,” Andrew says. “To a younger kid or a teenager learning the guitar, it’s just another thing they do in the day.”

This “lazy” attitude, as he calls it, lowers the pressure on ourselves to excel within the moment and encourages us to look at practice as an ongoing effort.

“Having a more careless attitude,” he says, “it means that when were practicing we’re more prone to learning a song or a technique or a scale not from a goal of perfecting it in that moment. We just put practice time into the effort and we do it for however long we feel like putting the time in. And we just feel like, ‘Tomorrow it will be better. I’ll bump things up to a higher level.’ ”

Take a look at the video below, and check out Andrew’s YouTube channel (GuitarBlogUpdate), for more of his videos.