If you've been playing guitar for a while and you've been stuck at the same level, people call that a plateau. But I have a problem with that word. The subtext is that you're stuck because you don't know how to improve. If you did know, you'd just do the thing more until you got better, and we'd call that a lack of practice, not a plateau.
There are so many resources out there that it can feel impossible to know where to go next. But what if you're not meant to know? I think you're not at a plateau. You're at a crossroads.
The double burden: why you can't see the next step ▶ 0:48
There's an idea called the double burden, which comes from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Applied to guitar, it says that the skill you need to know what to do next only comes once you've already done it.
In really simple terms: to know what you need to do to get better at guitar, you need to be better at guitar. That might feel like a rubbish thing to hear. But it tells you one crucial thing. You have to just do it anyway and go in a bit blind.
So instead of hunting for the one right answer, the question becomes how to structure your practice so you give yourself the best chance of improving. In my opinion there are two key things: time on the fretboard, and experimentation.
Time on the fretboard ▶ 1:46
Let's say someone paid your salary to play guitar for eight hours a day, unbroken. Not eight hours of checking your phone. Eight hours of actual playing, every day. If you can tell me with a straight face you wouldn't become a phenomenal player, I don't believe you.
I think even the least capable musicians would struggle not to get to a pretty competent level. Two hours of improv, two of technique, two of songwriting and two of learning songs, and you'd be a phenomenal musician in probably not very long. Through sheer trial and error you'd stumble across most of the techniques and knowledge you need. Even with pretty awful technique, you'd probably improve quite a lot.
You're probably not going to practise for eight hours a day. But it tells you that with time, you can get the hang of most things you want to do.
Test how much of your practice is real practice ▶ 3:14
Say you've got half an hour or an hour a day. Next time you sit down, set a timer and do nothing but practise until it goes off. No phone, no toilet break, nothing else. Sort yourself out beforehand.
You might be surprised by how much you get done in a short space of time. Or, the other way round, by just how distracted you normally get. Time is probably the biggest limiting factor for most guitarists, and it's not just hours on the fretboard. It's useful, undistracted hours. Simple, but often overlooked. Writing your sessions down in a practice log makes it harder to kid yourself.
Experimentation: the 80/20 split ▶ 3:52
If you spend all your time experimenting with new techniques, you never actually hone any of them. If you only practise what you already know, you never find anything new. So you need to split your time between the two, whether it's speed, improvisation, learning songs or writing them.
Don't worry too much about the exact split. I'd suggest it's probably more like 80% practising what you know and 20% trying new ideas. For some people it might be the other way round. I find that unlikely, but it could be you. If you go about your practice conscientiously, the right split will make itself known pretty soon.
The chess analogy ▶ 5:02
I play online chess when I get bored, and my rating has basically not moved in seven years. Partly because I don't really care about getting better. But mostly because I never try anything new. In that time I could have got really good, and I haven't, because I do the same thing every time and never look at what I did right or wrong.
Equally, if all I did was learn chess theory and never play, I'd get a bit better, but I wouldn't know how to use the tools, or find ways of playing that suit my style.
And this doesn't contradict the eight hours idea. If you sat me down to play chess for eight hours a day, I wouldn't just play random games. Out of sheer boredom I'd start learning new ideas and trying things. It's in our nature to try and learn.
Questions to ask yourself ▶ 6:49
Experimenting is often just asking more questions and thinking more critically. Some examples:
If you're working on speed:
- Do I actually practise fast enough to challenge my speed?
- Do I actually practise slowly enough to learn the movement properly?
- How am I angling my pick, and how hard am I hitting the strings?
- How close are my fingers to the strings as I move through the scale?
- What's the angle of my wrist? Is my palm on the strings? Am I anchoring my little finger?
If you think you're a boring soloist:
- Do I always play up and down the scale in order?
- Do I vary how hard I attack the strings?
- Do I always use techniques in the same place? Do I always bend the same note?
These seem obvious. But if you never sit down and actually ask them, you never think about them, and you never work on them. Ask enough of them and spend enough time on them, and you'll struggle not to run into the answer.
Pick a road and commit to it ▶ 8:00
So you're at a crossroads and you haven't decided what to do. Or you've decided, but it's the same thing as always, so you've driven straight past the crossroads.
You need to just decide to do something. It doesn't matter what that something is.
Go and learn jazz guitar. Go and learn heavy metal. Practise a scale you've not learnt before. Try something new and spend quite a lot of time on it. Isn't that obvious? Yeah, kind of. But if you were doing everything right, you'd be improving. So something needs to change, and the only way out of that loop is trying things without any guarantee of results.
You might try a hundred things before you find what works. Or you might try a hundred things and one day realise you're a better player without knowing how it happened. Unless you want to teach, that doesn't really matter.
Will something make you worse? There's not much out there that will. Follow your nose: if something smells like nonsense, it probably is, so don't do it. At some point you have to trust yourself.
So pick one new thing this week. Give it a few weeks, maybe a few months, alongside the undistracted practice you already do, and see what it does to your playing.
