Having a bad phase in guitar playing.
Every good guitarist goes through bad phases while learning guitar.
Pro musicians have it too. An unproductive phaze, when they aren't coming up with anything new, or anything good enough.
Q:What is a bad phase?
A bad phaze is
when your mind is way ahead of your level of playing, you are expecting too much from yourself.
-Like you might know all the scales but the phrasing is not turning out right. You wanted it to be like Carlos Santana.
-Or you might know the scale but your hand co-ordination is under-developed.
-Or many other things, where you're expecting a lot and are unhappy about your sound.
Q:What happens in a bad phase?
-You are just aware that the thing is not sounding good, or it is
sounding 'repetitive'.
-Its pretty compelling to give up practicing or think that maybe you're just not meant for it.
Its all right.
But its all right for such a phaze to occur once in a while.
It helps you re-evaluate yourself as a guitarist and your technique.
-
Because there's an impression you have about yourself as a guitarist or as any musician when you are playing an instrument. You subconsciously visualize yourself climbing a mountain ,that you're becoming more and more perfect, getting closer to the top.
-Once in a while when you play a little better you get a feeling you're closer to perfect.
But when a bad phaze occurs, this feeling gets disturbed. And you feel, I was close to perfect, then why am I sounding so bad now?
Never Perfect, Always evolving.
You're never perfect. You are always evolving, and sometimes your mind gets stuck in a pattern and you're just finding it hard to break out of it on the fretboard.
I've been through such phazes many times. And its pretty depressing.
We all wanna sound good.
How To deal with it:
- take a step backward.
-listen to music and I just play the vocal melodies on the guitar. By ear.
-keep doing that for a couple of days. And you will have covered many many songs vocals by the time you're out of it.
-eventually you get new ideas in soloing and phrasing.
-It also is very useful in ear training. You get to know how intervals lie on the fretboard.
Also
-keep practicing your alternate picking, to get the co-ordination right.
- Use different combinations, usually 3 notes on 2 strings is a good one to start with.
Practice inner strokes (inner picking).
To build strength for when you have a pattern which starts from an -up. And that means I literally keep playing just two strings over and over.
We all know that there are endless possibilities in music. And like Joe Satriani says, without a little imperfection, music would sound too melodic and very monotonous.
If you keep upto it, the phaze gets over before you know it and you are back onto it and learning new things.
A bad musician is only one who doesn't know his music.
So lay low, and jam again later.
Chxzao.
