The Reality of Learning Guitar (Battling Boredom)

what's up YouTube today we are going to talk about guitar my first love I remember being really young and listening to bands like Aerosmith the Eagles and Foreigner and just thinking man I really want to play guitar in fact Foreigner song Jukebox Hero which is arguably their cheesiest song was like my Rocky Balboa theme song [Music] and for my fifth birthday my dad surprised me with my first guitar I remember it like it was yesterday I heard him call from upstairs Christopher get up here right now I thought I was in trouble so I very hesitantly walked up the stairs and into his room and sitting right in the middle of his room was a cream-colored three-quarter size knockoff Stratocaster and my eyes just lit up [Applause] [Music] I couldn't wait I was gonna be the next Joe Walsh so my mom immediately signed me up with a guitar teacher at a local music shop and I remember the feeling of walking into my first guitar lesson my heart was just in my throat I walked into the little practice room sat down across from my very cool looking guitar teacher pulled out my brand new ax and eagerly awaited my virtuosic enlightenment now before we play any notes let's just take a minute to get to know your guitar a little bit this is called the neck of your guitar these are your strings and it might seem backwards but what was this I came here to be a jukebox Hero and now I'm sitting here counting strings and learning about frets where was my Zeppelin or my Sabbath my Hendrix where was my goddamn enlightenment it's time to play your first note so take your finger put it right here on the sixth string on the first fret now push down and pluck the string and it was at that moment that I realized guitar is hard and boring and I left that lesson not wanting to learn anymore lucky for me my mom doesn't play that so she made me go back again and again and again so throughout my childhood I bounced in and out of lessons I get bored I'd want to quit and then inevitably I'd get dragged back by my mom and while I never really stuck with lessons long enough to develop a robust guitar vocabulary I did stick with them long enough to get bit by the bug and start exploring on my own I learned how to pick out my favorite songs by ear performing at elementary school talent shows then I started writing my own songs and then playing in bands and touring and so on the rocket had left the launch pad and it was headed to the Moon with a full tank of fuel but then after about 25 years of Relentless writing recording and playing that fuel suddenly and unexpectedly ran out and the rocket came to a screeching halt like I said guitar was my first love and it's been my main squeeze for most of my life just like a lot of other relationships after being together for so long it sort of feels like the mystery is all gone and we've just sort of fallen into the same routine and patterns of daily life together other instruments have caught my eye and the Allure of guitar has started to fade let's put it this way for me if drums are the hot and heavy Forbidden Love Affair oh you want me to hit it again dang already all right all right then guitar is sort of like the stale old predictable marriage no I think Shark Week is on it's fun it's cool now on guitar my bread and butter has always been writing and being able to sing while playing some pretty technical stuff but one area where I feel like I've always been lacking is improvising I can play solos and I can write solos but I've always had a very hard time improvising solos so if I ever found myself at say a jam session I would either stick to one or two strings choose to play drums or avoid the session altogether but I feel like if I were to learn to improvise it would open up a whole new world to me so that's what I plan to do now it might just be from where I'm sitting but it seems like learning to improvise would take a lot more practice and focused effort than learning how to write a song it requires knowing things like scales and arpeggios and chord shapes and keys basically all of the stuff that I got bored with in guitar lessons and getting those things internalized enough to where you can be spontaneous and in the moment so to start out I'm gonna check out drumio's sister site guitario and see if there's anything on there that can help me take my first steps so let's get to it so guitario much like drumeo is a music learning website for guitar and again Mike drummio it has a guitario method which walks you from beginner all the way to Advanced although I must say it seems a little bit less robust and it has all of these courses I am not going to do the guitario method from beginning to end because why doing the method seems like it would be way too crazy but I am gonna find a course on improvising and take that so we'll go to topic improvisation and soloing perfect and right here second from the top learn to Solo in an hour that sounds good I've got dirty Stevie right here and let's dive in and see what this nice young lady has to say the most important scale for soloing I'm going to take a guess that it is the minor pentatonic scale what do you think comment below so let me show you the scale that I've been talking about it's called the minor pentatonic scale I knew it foreign I immediately feel like I am back in guitar lessons right now tons of guitar players have built entire careers off of the back of the minor pentatonic scale [Music] is the bread and butter of blue soloing it makes sense that they'd be starting with that [Music] I'm gonna skip to the next video because I'm bored in this lesson I wanted to talk a little bit about what a guitar solo is in the first place and what makes a good guitar solo I'm gonna skip that lesson and go to um building a lick vocabulary why don't we build our lick vocabulary number one sounds something like this [Music] all right let's see what the next lick is [Music] [Applause] [Music] if you saw my video on the top five tips for sucking up music then you'll remember something that I said about the Goldilocks zone of Music Learning you don't want something to be too hard but you also don't want something to be too easy because you'll get bored and guys I am bored just with how long I've been playing so let's see what else we've got mastering the blues scale 6-4 blues scale shape honestly you guys like seeing tablature really me up six four blues scale shape I like to call it the six four USA from the academics a practical standpoint for this one I think is more calling it something like the three one because I am so bad at Guitar learning I'm just realizing this now if learning drums is like figuring out a coordination puzzle learning guitar is sort of like taking a math test I'm not saying that this is for everybody else but for me guitar feels like studying AP math it's just so expressionless that makes sense it's good to get the stuff under your belt to express yourself through the guitar but God damn it it is so boring I don't want to do this lesson whole step whole step half step whole step whole step whole step half step okay so I am going to abandon the guitario idea nothing against katario if guitar learning is something that works for your brain then guitario is great but I'm starting to realize something and it's that learning guitar in a traditional way has just never really been all that interesting to me so I'm gonna revisit it at some point on my own but I remember this episode of guitar moves with Josh Homme where he's talking about the way that he plays guitar and the scales that he uses so I'm going to take a look at that so blue skills but I started saying what if I take things out and I go [Music] yeah this is something I wanted to ask you about because what the hell are you doing that would be the normal blues scale and Josh's scale foreign [Music] when did you figure that one out when I was 13 and I'm still doing it now that's amazing [Music] it's weird on the fingers thank you but [Music] but it can cause sounding there's almost like curtsing and like I'm cursing I'm going so I'm gonna take a Queens of the Stone Age rhythm [Music] and I'm in a loop it and then I'm gonna mess around with the scale [Music] all right it could use some work [Music] foreign [Music] so I am definitely nowhere near proficient on it but it is a lot of fun [Music] it lends itself better to a regular minor pentatonic scale [Music] right without the crazy [Music] but it's fun to find a place to make it work and sometimes even if it doesn't work if you just keep hitting it over and over and over again until it does it sounds like it was intentional so I'm just gonna roll on it and see what happens I've literally never done this before never just let a Groove roll and just see what I can do we'll see whoosh [Music] [Music] a little ahead of myself [Music] thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] that's enough of that okay so that was actually kind of fun and I learned a few things about myself in the process first of all I'm a little bit further along than I thought I was by no means would I consider myself to be fretboard fluent but it does seem like all of those years of playing guitar have amounted to something I found that if I thought about things too much I would get tripped up but when I kind of zoned out and let the muscle memory and the ear take over I was actually kind of surprised by what came out did I play anything mind-bending absolutely not but was it as much of a train wreck as I thought it was going to be I don't think so although you can let me know your thoughts in the comments I also found that for me and for where I'm at with guitar it's important to find the right way to practice and the right source to draw that inspiration from at the end of the day Josh homme's scale is just a scale like any other scale but the way that Josh presented his approach and the added challenge of trying to to throw those odd notes in there every once in a while opened up a back door to scale practice for me it was challenging but it was engaging and fun and that's something I've kind of never experienced when it came to learning scales and lastly I learned that again for me my biggest blocker when it comes to improvising is mostly mental the dexterity and the shapes and the patterns are all kind of there but my lack of confidence gets in the way so building and strengthening the connection between What I Hear in my head and what I'm playing is probably going to be the biggest piece of the puzzle for me I hear that singing the notes as you're playing them will help with that so maybe I'll start trying it the last thing I want to say is to remember that everyone's journey is unique where I'm at on guitar might be completely different from where you're at on guitar and while this was my first real Exploration with improvising it's important to remember that I'm also working with a lifetime of playing guitar and that you shouldn't look at this in as a benchmark for where you should be if you're just learning to improvise you might have an easier time with it or a more challenging time but it's all relative to your experiences on the instrument so just try to explore and let loose and have fun thank you all for watching this whole YouTube Journey has been interesting to say the least and I'm super glad to have you all along for the ride so until next time forget to enjoy the process and embrace the suck [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Chris Hayzel

Views: 120,215

Keywords: this is why you suck at guitar, guitar slides, lesson, arpeggios, riffs, rhythm guitar, beginner, advanced, how to play, power chords, alternate picking, economy picking, pick slanting, guitar lesson, secret technique, must know, tapping, beato, Rock lessons, queens of the stone age, josh homme, rock guitar, electric guitar, learning to improvise, Guitar improvising, you suck at music, guitar bends, minor pentatonic scale, fedner stratocaster, gibson les paul

Id: kfhTruV_7aM

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023