Playing Guitar is Kids Stuff
Learning anything—whether it’s your ABCs, tying your shoelaces, playing baseball, swimming, or playing guitar—depends on practice. How well you perform any task depends on how effectively you train your brain, mind, and muscles.
Learning to play guitar is no different from learning to drive a car or ride a bike. You can’t learn to drive by just practicing braking or turning the steering wheel.
You learn to drive a car by driving it, just as you learn to ride a bike by riding it—and you learn to play guitar by playing songs.
Learning many simple tasks requires mastering all of their components simultaneously. You can’t learn to swim just by jumping into a pool, kicking your feet, or swinging your arms. You need to learn all the actions required to swim at the same time, or you’ll risk struggling in the water.
Learning guitar solely by focusing on chords is not only inefficient, unproductive, and time-consuming, but it is also very boring. When the mind becomes bored, it stops paying attention and ceases to learn. Many students give up, believing they can’t learn to play guitar, because trying to learn by only practicing chords is so difficult.
Playing the guitar involves much more than just strumming chords. When you strum a chord, you’re creating a specific sound. Strumming six different chords produces six different sounds. Eventually, you’ll find it challenging to make any song sound natural—just by strumming chords.
Playing a guitar automatically implies playing a song and making music. To do so properly, you must train your brain, mind, and muscles to master a song’s tempo, rhythm, melody, and, usually, the words.