What did it take to build playing Electric Guitar as my hobby?
Once I had an acoustic guitar which I had borrowed from one of my friends. Though I wanted to learn guitar, soon the interest faded away and the guitar was into the dust. This happened due to numerous reasons — improper time management, finger pain, running out of patience, not practising enough, laziness and many more.
Though the interest to learn guitar was still intact, I decided to purchase an Electric Guitar. Justin Guitar was especially helpful in getting the right approach to get started with the guitar.
There is absolutely no necessity to grow long hairs and look like a professional guitarist. Though, following a Guitarist or Band and wanting to be able to play your favourite song would help in goal setting and move towards it.
These are a few things that might help in learning Guitar or any other art form as a hobby.
1. Goal (Destination)
‘Start with an end in mind’
Create targets for your progress and this will act as a milestone. This also helps like a feedback mechanism and gauge your progress accordingly.
To begin with, there needs to be an end goal. It might be something like this — ‘ I should be playing guitar during the next Annual Day’ .
The progress seems to faster if it is driven by a goal-oriented approach. There is a good analogy to this -
A sailor in a deep-sea would reach his destination faster if he is clear about the destination and knows ways to get to it with some guidance. Rather than not having one, he would wander all around ultimately landing up no where still in the middle of the ocean.
2. Time
Do you have time to accommodate 20 minutes into your daily schedule?
‘Do little but regularly’
Accommodate some time exclusively for practising the guitar and stick to the timetable. It might so happen that some days you might be exhausted or not willing to practice. During those days just pick up the guitar strum some strings and put the guitar back to its place. This ensures you don’t break your timetable and the momentum.
Dedicating sometime in the morning would always be favourable, as the major tasks to be done will be accomplished in the morning. Pushing it to the evening usually will end up missing routines due to other commitments.
3. Practice
The initial days of playing might make your fingers uncomfortable. The sound coming from the guitar strings might seem unpleasant, as the fingers are not getting placed appropriately. It might take months together to get to the tune. Throughout the process, patience is very important.
There always seems to be a barrier, crossing it looks impossible in the beginning. But if you hold on and break this barrier then the experience of playing becomes pleasurable as you go on and it becomes better and better as you keep practising.
4. Discipline
A disciplined approach to developing art is the most important factor. A schedule to play the guitar in my todoist app, a time management productivity app. When you do many things, one tends to lose track and productivity apps like todoist can offload things from your mind. There are a lot of productivity apps in the App Store, you might also find Trello, one more app which might be effective as well to get the job done on the time management front.
5. A teacher
It's always easy to learn when we have a teacher around who can guide when we are into something new. With the power of the internet, one can learn anything at the comfort of the home. I found Justin from Justin Guitar is one of a great online tutor to learn guitar. The website is very structured, developed with beginners in focus it makes easy through the journey of learning guitar and is completely free.
Then there is Fender Play, it has many teachers coming together under the same platform. There are quite a lot of instruments you can learn here. The website is great, very intuitive, tools to track your progress and a lot of many features but its a paid one.
Anyone interested can go through both these websites and pick a platform which suits the purpose. Apart from these, there are a lot of other websites, Youtube videos. But I found that these are not structured well and it’s easy to get lost as you start getting into the advanced levels of learning.
6. Instruments and Accessories
Ultimately you need an instrument to play, practice and get well in the art. After understanding one’s requirements doing some market search should help you to pick the right instrument. There might be some accessories that assist in the learning experience including picks, amplifiers, straps, books, apps etc.
7. Determination or wanting to learn something new.
It's easy to lose track of things when we are occupied with routine tasks mainly official work which takes the major portion of our day to day activity putting everything else to the sidelines. Therefore it is essential to keep the blend of determination and building habits in the roll.
One last thing, having buddies around who have similar interests could be one more factor that might help. If you could find people who can jam along, then it would catapult your abilities to the higher levels. Ultimately once you do get a start, make it a habit, you need to keep practicing to take the art forward to the respect it deserves.
