Train your brain to learn guitar
Lee Ryan in his book: The Natural Classical Guitar: The Principles of Effortless Playing tells us what we already know, but struggle to enact. What he says is that,
“it is letting go and playing naturally, not struggling, that elicits the loveliest music – and your best performance”.
But before we can even begin to let go and to play naturally and effortlessly we have to get rid of the thoughts that limit our progression.
But before we can do this, we need to recognise what our mental obstacles are.
I’m getting a lot of messages from people coming here because they want to learn to play guitar as part of worship. If this is you, you might want to join Aaron Anastasi’s programme. Aaron is a musician and a worship leader. He put together a step by step programme for aspiring Christian musicians. If you're interested, you can use the exercises and advice in learn-classical-guitar-today to develop your finger strength and dexterity and Aaron's lessons to work on strumming and worship music.
CLICK HERE TO LEARN WORSHIP GUITAR !!
This means making the subconscious conscious.
And then, once you’ve done so recognising which parts of these almost subconscious mental attitudes you want to strengthen as habits and which are simply not serving you anymore. You would also need to identify which of these mental attitudes have served as mental obstacles to your development and which are serving your guitar goals well.
On a daily basis your brain and body perform a range of extremely complex processes and they do so in concert and with completely effortlessly. In much the same way, your brain can be trained to undertake complex musical actions effortlessly that feels natural and completely easy.
The short answer to how you do this is that you repeat a complex process over and over again which allows new neural pathways to form. These neural pathways then allow you to perform the same action but with far less energy. As these neural pathways deepen, even less energy is needed to perform exactly the same set of actions, thoughts (or combinations of actions and thoughts).
A crucial step to enabling the formation of new neural pathways is recognising the limiting thoughts that are potentially holding you back and limiting your progress.
Here’s where the MENTAL OBSTACLES LIMITING YOUR GUITAR LEARNING will help you. I’ve put together for you a free report on the Top Three Mental Obstacles Limiting Your Guitar Learning. The report contains three tasks that you are asked to undertake that allows you to reflect, engage and potentially change mental attitudes that have been limiting your guitar learning.
You'll need to go a little deeper into music theory as you proceed. The best online resource for this is Guitar Theory Revolution. It recognises that music theory is very hard for guitarists because music theory has till now been located in the piano paradigm. The Guitar Theory Revolution overthrows the piano paradigm that is holding you back and embraces the attributes of the guitar to unpack music theory. In fact, it goes further and allows you to see that the guitar is one of the best instruments for learning theory.
