Are You Improving Your Guitar Skills Or Just Memorising

Some people think analogies are corny or pointless. Sometimes I think they can be useful for really getting a point across and I’m going to use one right now!.

Certain things have an infinite amount of variables and an example of somebody who has to work in such an environment is a car mechanic. It’s entirely possible for someone to go to college, study car mechanics and end up with a job managing a repair garage because he was liked in the interview and answered every single question correctly. He knows every single make of carburettor and every model number, he knows how to replace almost every part on hundreds of cars, he knows the torque settings for almost every cylinder head and can quote part numbers off the top of his head for all the commonly stocked parts and has committed to memory every common fault known about the cars he works with and overall can impress every customer that walks into his garage. However, none of this necessarily makes him a great car mechanic.

A car mechanic must possess the ability to replace any part confidently and be able to trace any fault that could possibly crop up within the workings of a car. This requires knowledge, experience, technical skills (to replace parts) and the ability to think outside the box. Armed with only these few things he can do everything that the person in the first example could do and much much more, the only thing he may fail on is the ability to impress customers. His working knowledge and experience of the car engine allows him to think his way through any situation to produce a likely set of results of what may be causing a fault and come up with ways to correct it or find what part needs replacing. This person has everything whereas the first person only has a great memory and a method to impress on the surface.

How does this relate to the musician?. For the first example let’s think about playing fast as this is probably the most common musicians trick that will impress easily on the surface. There is a great number of guitarists that spend most of their time practicing all the techniques required to play fast and committing an amount of licks and scale runs to memory. For their choice of music they can pull off some solos that impress people very easily (mostly the non musician) but they can only do it for so long before they run out of steam and all their ideas start to sound the same. Most of the guitarists that actually do this also do it very badly but this will usually go unnoticed to the average listener. They have basically spent all their time learning only a certain technique and memorising many patterns.

The second example is the musician that doesn’t necessarily have the ability to play super fast (although he may and whatever speed he does play he usually plays it perfectly) but he has utilised all of his experience and knowledge to further his skills as a musician and can always come up with something that fits the music and works well even if it’s something he has never worked with before. This is the musician that will go on impressing people throughout his guitar playing career even if he never gets to win a speed show he is the only one that will ever get taken seriously by those that listen to music seriously.

The thing here is most guitarist possess the ability to achieve the best of both worlds, I’m not knocking speed because it is a great technique to have and some styles do require it but if you want to be a serious musician then it’s important that you start working on the music as much as the technique because you can be a good guitarist without speed but you can’t be a good guitarist on speed alone. There are only two requirements necessary to achieve this.

1. Never commit anything you learn to pure memory only, be sure to experiment with every idea in different ways, over different keys, rhythms (feel), tempos and chord progressions and always try to understand why it works wherever you use it or learn it so well that you can use your trained ear to pull it out when needed.

2. Never play any faster than you can play perfectly unless it is part of your practice schedule where pushing the boundaries are occasionally required, only once you have something absolutely perfect will you find you also have enough headroom to push further. If you are struggling to improve your speed then find out why because you are likely doing something wrong. There will always be others that can play faster than you but impressive speeds are still available to anybody, forget the myth about natural talent and remember that to the experienced or serious listener speed played badly stands out immensely as incredibly amateur.

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