> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
I think listening and transcribing is great advice. Careful listening will help to improve your own listening ability and taste. It also helps to demystify why something is great.
But it's also going to be a struggle - especially at first. You have to be prepared to struggle, a LOT. Most people won't be able to keep at it, and that's one of the things that separates the greats from everyone else.
I'm a jazz musician, and my kids are both professional classical players. I've asked them why they don't learn to play jazz. My daughter described pretty much what Glass is saying here. She calls it "fear of sucking." She knows what good jazz improvisation sounds like, and trying to make herself do it is pretty discouraging.
Not that there's anything wrong with loving and playing classical music, which is a factor too.
This may be why it's different when you start very young. You're not conscious of your own sucking, you just play, usually in a setting where everybody's congratulating you. For sucking. ;-)
I started on classical, and got into jazz by accident, as a bassist. It turns out that you can function in a band as a bassist without having to improvise very much, so I was able to learn at my own pace and eventually did. In fact a lot of good jazz players started out in school jazz bands or large ensembles where you didn't have to be a good improviser right up front.
I picked up Violin as an adult, have done recitals, and I suck. Being able to suck and find joy in something anyway even if you're not top nth percentile is a valuable life skill.
I think it's pretty frustrating if the songs/pieces you actually want to play are demanding or even at the virtuoso level.
If you really want to play a David Gilmour guitar solo or sing some Led Zeppelin, it better not suck because it won't hit the mark at all.
For me, the reason to pick up the guitar as a kid was to play stuff I liked, stuff that turned out not to be that easy, and every time I play, I feel that gap of where I feel I should be to respect the music I'm trying to play.
Rick Beato did a video about being able to identify guitarists by a single note. David Gilmour was by far the easiest to recognize. I got me wondering how much work would it take to even be able to play a single note as well as David Gilmour. And even then I would still only be imitating someone, not creating something original.
There's plenty of good stuff that's hard to play, but there's also so much good stuff that's relatively easy.
It's also obvious to me that at this point I'm never going to reach the virtuoso level even if I really wanted to, but so what? I suck, but whenever I manage to play something that I couldn't before it brings me joy.
So many things in life are better if you can get past that fear of not being good. Because very very few people can skip the stage where they are not good. (I'd be comfortable saying nobody. But there is always somebody, it seems.)
This is so true! I think as kids we naturally don't mind doing something creative and it not working out well, but as adults, we worry too much about seeming competent.
In a career, seeming competent can be valuable, but for learning something new and creative, it often just creates a barrier to getting started.
This is good advice for most human activities. I told my students these exact words (you gotta get comfortable being uncomfortable) countless times when teaching math and physics.
I picked up singing 4 years ago (I’m 42 now), starting from nothing, and I’ve been taking regular lessons. I still suck. But I suck slightly less than I did when I was starting, and what motivates me is the sheer joy that it brings. I just hope it lasts.
Stephen King said something similar (but I'm sure I'm misquoting): Every writer begins with one million terrible words inside them. The sooner you get those words out, the sooner you get to the good stuff.
A lot of us don't turn out to be professional musicians, writers or athletes. In between family and work, you start to realize how much these people put in to be at the top of their game. Time and effort you can't really put in if you didn't make the jump and have other life commitments.
I guess that's why a lot of people grow old wondering what life would have been if they would have followed through on whatever talent they appeared to possess in youth.
I was at a dance hall the other day, and this young lady came floating in. It's hard to describe how she walked - just like she was effortlessly gliding. It looks easy, but anyone else would look like a moose trying it.
It's the result of a lifetime of ballet dancing. Probably 10,000 hours, at least.
Not to counter your point, but you must have never seen moose moving at speed through a forest. They are astonishingly graceful and surprisingly quiet.
It's not just the 10,000 hours, it's learning it very young.
I am an ex-professional ballet dancer, and one of the things I always find interesting is that any experienced ballet dancer can instantly tell who trained as a child and who didn't solely by how they stand (literally not even moving) at the barre. But the thing is, children with only a few years of training under their belt will often show this good form, while I have literally never seen someone who started as an adult, even dedicated adults who take class 4-5 times a week, get rid of that "I started as an adult" posture.
As an example, I was actually quite impressed at how Natalie Portman really managed to "look the part" in her role as a ballerina in Black Swan. Still, she wasn't fooling anyone with training - even with just a simple port de bras (raising of an arm), you could easily tell she wasn't a dancer.
My partner's also a dance, and this is what's always come across from her, too - that you can tell a dancer from a glance in an instant, even on the street. I have a little bit of an eye for it but only by virtue of being around that environment.
(also: ex-pro ballet to HN? Can't imagine there's much crossover in that Venn!)
I'm not in the least surprised by that. Bones in children are softer and more malleable, they don't harden up until 16 or so. (That's why young athletes should stick to more reps and lighter weights until 16.)
I've tried emulating those movements, and just look like Bullwinkle.
Another incident: I was stepping out of my ride to the airport, and noticed another woman pulling her luggage out of the trunk of a car. I remarked "I bet you're a ballet dancer." She said "nope, I'm an ice dancer!" Funny I could tell just by the way she wrangled the luggage.
I just started photography last year and it makes much sense. This and:
- do it with intention, to copy or simulate to learn how to do what you want.
If you just go out and take random pictures you will not learn much. If you go and try to simulate some style, lightning, you learn a lot.
I also think most of my pictures really suck even if i try. But then i look on pictures of someone who has "photographer" in profile with couple thousand subscribers and most of their pictures also suck.
I hope one day to bridge the gap.
I always tell people the secret to learning guitar fast is to practice for a minimum of 5 minutes a every day for 20 years. It's simultaneously a gross oversimplification while also literally being the only way to do it.
I think another aspect is regarding fundamentals. In order to stay engaged in the early years, you will skip over the minutia. But to achieve the next level, you must go back and drill the fundamentals, unlearning any bad habits in the process. Only then, once you’ve “learned the rules”, can you then surpass/break them.
This works for programming as well. I’ve spent countless hours reimplementing things or cloning things just to learn how they work. Sometimes mine is better than the original, sometimes it’s not. But regardless, I learn a lot along the way and occasionally get to teach something as well. It’s a great way to learn new languages, new concepts, new systems.
Taste absolutely can and does evolve the more you play.
It doesn't mean that everyone taste evolves towards one absolute taste, people stay different.
I kinda think it applies to all artistic hobbies. On one hand you learn a practical hands-applying skill, on another hand you learn how to express yourself and/or listen to expression of others in chosen medium. And, well, the more you look at something, the more you see. The more you see, the more you know your own preferences.
What's even more funny, the "detail perception" skill doesn't always sync to your guitar skill. So (for me at least) there are times when I'm thinking I'm the hottest stuff around (because I just mastered something I deemed important), and there are times when I'm down because my detail perception suddenly got better and turns out I would prefer to play with more nuance (but didn't learn how to yet)
I've picked up a couple languages relatively easily and I 100% attribute it to the fact that I have no shame - zero
I will speak in my ugly, broken, American accent and do it til I improve. I didn't read about this technique in a book or anything, I simply mirrored what I saw kids do and IMO a big reason kids do well with picking up language (aside from all the physiological stuff) is that they actual speak it - they aren't concerned about whether it sounds like baby talk or not
A lot of advice feels trite and cliche, like keep trying, etc - but often times it takes repetition and hearing the message in many different ways before it sinks. As a tangent - this is the value i found in therapy too - a great therapist that was patient and consistent in their messaging day in and day out eventually led to some of what they said sinking in.
I also picked up a couple languages as an adult and can attest to this. You have to be willing to talk and know you are butchering the language. Nobody cares either. People are genuinely pleased to hear the effort, especially if you're a guest in their country.
I’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore.
I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.
I would assume it's grating for anybody to hear their mother tongue butchered. More so when both sides know they could just switch English and have an adult conversation instead of struggling to buy a loaf of broad and a bottle of water. I always feel the urge to switch and have to remind myself that the other person is making a big effort on their side and that should be appreciated and respected.
P.S. My mother tongue is Spanish and it's many accents are anything but standardized.
That reminds me of an interview I heard with comicbook artist Chip Zdarsky. He was talking about how we all love to draw as kids, but eventually around 10 years old or so we start to become aware that what we see in our heads isn't anywhere near what's appearing on the page in our drawings, and that gap acts as a powerful filter discouraging most people from pursuing art any further.
I’ve transcribed hundreds of hours of guitar music over 25+ years, using the method described in this article. It was such a slog that I ended up creating tool to help streamline the process: Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/).
It combines audio playback directly with a tab editor, so that you can immediately write down what you’ve figured out and your transcription stays in sync with the original audio. This makes transcribing incredibly fast and (importantly) accurate.
It’s got audio slowdown, precise looping, “synth overlay” (playback of the transcription and original audio at the same time, to spot errors), auto stem separation and a full-featured tab/notation editor with support for hundreds of notations.
When you’re done, you get a very useful artifact: a synced transcription, effectively a bespoke practice environment for that piece of music.
Over the years, Soundslice has expanded into a lot more than a pure transcription tool, but lots of people still use it for its original intended purpose. (It supports any instrument that uses western music notation, not just guitar.) If you’re at all interested in transcribing music, give it a shot.
How have i never heard about this, will definitely give a try.
What about a DAW integrated transcription tool, as a VST maybe, is it too niche? This is something i always wanted and never really found in the capacity i needed, essentially doing what soundslice does both track per track and also having the full score, most tools available try to convert to midi via usual methods or do some mumbo-jumbo AI to write the score. Since 90% of recording musicians time is spent on a DAW and sometimes having everything in the box streamlines the work a lot.
One truth I've observed from decades of keen hobbyist involvement in guitar music and playing is that a lifetime of music is largely an individual journey.
The fact that some players learn by transcribing, while others learn by jamming, and yet others learn by rote theoretical study, or 10-hour practice sessions, etc, is a big part of the variety which results in the wonderfully varied tapestry of music styles and approaches that humanity creates and enjoys.
Not to take away from the age-old, valid advice in the link about the value of ear-to-fretboard work.
The individual who has a breakthrough often feels compelled to call it a “system” and start telling others about it.
The great advice someone has is just what worked for them. It will probably work for others, especially if it repeats common advice, but it won’t work for everyone.
If I practice guitar for 6 hours a day (like John Petrucci in his teenage years) while always wearing an orange hat, I’ll get pretty damn good at the guitar in a few years. I can then spread the word to everyone that the best way to learn the guitar is to always wear an orange hat.
As with the dangers of ‘productivity porn’, ultimately what matters most is putting in the hours.
But one thing I like to stress is: You get to decide how to spend that time. Sure it is occasionally good to spend the time on "no fun" practise, especially if you feel your playing is lacking. But you don't get magically better results if you suffer while practising.
I'd argue the opposite: The person who has fun while practising will also learn and they will be inclined to put more hours in.
My take is that there are probably multiple systems out there than can help you achieve mastery, but it depends on your personality, life circumstances, etc. Just like there ten thousand paths up the mountain. It is a good idea to try out a couple and find the one that works for you. Then if you get to the point where you master your target skill and it is your turn to spread the gospel of "the way", it is good to keep in mind why it worked for you.
I think you need both. If you never stop or slow down, it's hard to build the proper muscle memory to improve and get more accurate. However, it's also valuable to practice playing through mistakes to finish a whole song. Mistakes happen, and if you're playing for a crowd you can't just stop and start over.
Yes, both. A good example why is for example, as muscle memory grows it will bias your note selection when improvising. Sometimes you really need to slow down to consciously force yourself to explore other sounds. Once you've done that, you need to wear it in again so it sounds natural in your playing.
Absolutely. You can get "locked in" to certain patterns / phrases just via muscle memory and familiarity. Need to balance that with a little improv to find new patterns phrases you like, and then can train those in via muscle memory.
Everyone learns different, but there is something universal in music that is essential to mastering an instrument. You should be able to hear something in your head and then play it. The goal is there is no barrier between your thoughts and actions. Learning to play by ear like that is the best way to get there in pretty much all instances. Looking up tabs is still great, and you can learn a ton from that (huh? another song with G, C, and D, I wonder why? Is it similar to the C, F, and G songs I'm playing?) but if you want to get next level that is the best way. I am a guitar play and I was in a band with another guitar player. I had a music minor, thousands of hours of practice and knew my theory inside and out. The other guitar player barely knew any theory but was way better than me and one of the best guitar players I've ever heard. He could just play. He didn't need to know the theory, he could hear it in his head.
Sting famously learned to play bass using this sort of technique with music on LPs, lifting the needle and dropping it back a bit in the track over and over again as he gradually worked out the notes and fingering.
Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
I started playing electric bass in college, around 1984. I too used the record and lifting the needle technique. The only reason I'm commenting is that early on I learned a LOT of Police songs. Why? Because
(1) the songs were already in my head,
(2) Sting would have two or three cool hooks per song, and this is the important part,
(3) the hooks would played over and over during the song. That meant I could play the song all the way through and get to practice each riff 10 times or more with just a single needle lift.
> Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
There are a few pedagogical points here to keep in mind:
first, there are local maxima in terms of learning something like guitar where you get bad habits and the only way to progress is to undo them.
Also, different ways of learning have different values in terms of what goals you're aiming towards and very importantly what kind of practice will keep you motivated in a sustainable way. Sometimes, taking shortcuts in some ways means you might slow down your growth rate but you'll have better overall growth because you'll keep at it for longer
> Some of the fastest and most famous guitarists had shockingly bad technique.
The universe didn't offer a manual on how to play guitar, so how are you determining that their technique was bad? Given what you say about them, maybe they actually had the perfect technique?
The universe didn’t offer a manual, but mankind has largely arrived at some orthodoxy for the most efficient and ergonomic ways to fret, bend, pluck, tap, strum, etc. In many cases, these are objectively better techniques to use once mastered, but they’re not the only way.
I see this "bad technique" angle expressed quite often when talking about self-learning. I tend to think it is overblown a bit. I started learning piano by myself during covid. Then I went to two teachers. Neither one had anything bad to say about my technique.
> as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
And at least for me, frequency beats duration. I make more progress when I play consistently for even 10 minutes every day than when I play for 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon.
Add some distance and sensitivity. I used blunt / brute force repetitions and somehow wasted years. Music is very subtle, and keeping a focus on small details is worth thousands of hours.
>If you mess up, redo the part you messed up correctly 5 times in a row.
I think it may be important to note _when_ to redo this. I started off this way, but after working with a guitar teacher (a Berklee graduate), he recommended that I continue on with the song and return to the problematic parts afterwards. If you constantly stop at the problematic parts to replay them and get it right, you'll have no idea what other parts you'll have trouble with further into the song until much later. In addition to that, being able to move on and continue playing the song after making a mistake is an important skill itself. If you build that skill, it's usually only other musicians that will notice -- a regular audience won't.
I can be pretty bizarre without even trying, I'll take both ;)
Practice makes perfect is a thing, but that's not exactly rehearsal.
With practice you expect to improve, broaden, or maintain instrumental or musical ability for the long term. There should be no deadlines or need for actual listenability.
OTOH rehearsal is the run-up to a smooth listenable performance with a decidedly short-term objective by comparison. Unless you are rehearsing to absolute perfection, you do not halt for anything, the show must go on and that in itself requires you to practice covering up and compensating for your mistakes or shortcomings as you go along.
With practice you are actually trying to become a better player overall, but rehearsal is more about making the next performance as good as it can be and that's it.
If you're not actually as good as you would like in either regard, having a bit of commitment to simulating what you need most can give some direction itself to add to the mix.
Been plucking at the guitar (literally and figuratively - trying to learn) for a couple of years now and Justin's (free) course was the best I've found. His videos are compassionate, funny, explain things really well and easy to follow. He also dog-fed the instructions by learning to play left-handed (and posted those videos as well, hilarious to watch).
Compared to that, some time earlier I subscribed to a Berklee free course on Coursera (iirc) - Beginner guitar. Felt like a fumbling idiot, almost never touched guitar afterwards.
Another 10/10 free course is Scotty West’s Absolutely Understand Guitar on YouTube. Filmed in the 90s and it’s still one of the best classes out there.
2. Started playing cover tunes, did that extensively for years. Practiced by butt off. Played with a lot of different people.
3. Went back to learning theory.
For me my main motivation to learn guitar was to play in a band, not to become good at the guitar itself. But it turned out that I was talented enough to learn a lot by just screwing around. When I went back to learn theory, I already knew the sounds and patterns - I just didn't a name for them.
With that said, If I could go back, I'd just start with learning all the notes on the fretboard, all the basic chord and scale shapes. It's actually not that hard, but you need motivation.
I've played with hundreds of other guitarists since then, given lessons, played session etc. and one of my early surprises was how many different reasons people had to learn the guitar. I just assumed everyone were like me - wanted to jam and play cool tunes. But then I met some really good players that had zero interest in playing with others, play cover songs in general, or even write songs. They were perfectly happy with exploring theory, for the sake of theory - the complete opposite of myself at the time.
> With that said, If I could go back, I'd just start with learning all the notes on the fretboard, all the basic chord and scale shapes. It's actually not that hard, but you need motivation.
I agree, but if the guitar is someone's first instrument it may also be their only creative outlet or seen as a means to an end. They're almost guaranteed to do what you did and probably even skip the lessons.
I think the physical act of playing an instrument is very overrated, and music education is underrated. Even just a few years of putting kids in the school band goes a long way. Being familiar with sightreading and basic music theory sounds boring, but it makes everything else a breeze when they want to learn something on their own.
Of course, there are also tons of people who were in a bad program and it was worse than nothing for their motivation. That's another topic though.
It’s a great article on something that’s useful, but a bit overconfident in its universality. Better at what? There are many dimensions to being a guitar player. Is it technique? Theory? Ability to pickup a song by ear (this article)? Better at playing in a group? Better at playing solo? Better at reading music? Better at accurate bends? Better at fingerpicking?
One of the nice things about music is you can’t get good at ALL of it. You have to pick where to focus. I’ll also say, you might need to ask yourself if you want to get better. I love relaxing by reading through the chords on a new song and playing it. I already have a job, and the time I truly have for intentional practice is like once a month. Most people are not studying to become guitar pros but to enjoy their time with the instrument. If that is your goal let joy be your guide. Perhaps some short term pain is part of that journey but really weigh out what you want out of the experience.
My appoach is more focused on continuity rather than stop-analyze-go style suggested on this article. Select a song, get a well sounding tab of that song, pick a section, loop it slow enough so you can reasonably hit the notes, once you play it well speed it up and repeat this until 120% speed, repeat this whole process for all sections and you're done.
Recognizing melodies by ear is a hugely useful skill, but I can't help but think it's going to be nearly impossible to do without a sound foundation in music theory.
Tabs are, in large part, paint-by-number. Lots of guitarists out there are only interested in learning a song. Regardless of key, mode, or what the notes actually are. And, tabs satisfy that group by saying: "Play this fret on this string".
To write tabs, you'll need to be able to make an educated guess at what's being played. ex. "Is that a minor pentatonic scale? Or are they arpeggiating a minor 7th chord?". If terms like that aren't in your musical vocabulary, and you haven't played enough to recognize the difference, I don't see how a guitarist would even begin writing their own tabs. Maybe the author is assuming this skill set.
> you haven't played enough to recognize the difference
I think the key bit here is that this is aimed at someone who is proficient, but not "good" ie can play tab, but not much else.
I think its perfectly possible to transcribe if you don't "know" musical theory, but for guitar, you should need to know chord shapes.
The key or mode is probably not actually that important, because you are transcribing rather then improvising. Obviously it will reduce the search space considerably if you do know what key/mode its in.
But you'd be surprised at how much musical theory is innate, or at lease learnt through listening.
Having learned guitar in a way that's somewhat similar to what's outlined in this article, I will say that someone doing this transcription-based method will likely naturally consolidate their "making tabs" into "making chords" pretty quickly, because the patterns occur often enough. I'd also say that producing your own tabs is very far away from a being a mere tab-consumer, it's just a natural introductory medium because tabs are very easily digestible to a beginner and, as you say, satisfy the craving.
I think that starting off with easy songs, and with enough brute force as you scale up, you can become organically familiar with these concepts to make the educated guesses you're talking about.
Many renowned musicians were able to effectively create music utilising these concepts despite never formally learning music theory, and by just learning by ear.
Learning formal music theory helped me a lot when I was a teenager playing guitar and piano, and having absorbed all that theory more than fifty years ago helps me to continue enjoy playing and improvising music now.
But over the years I realized that there were gaps in the Western classical theory I studied.
A relatively small one is that I never systematically studied jazz harmony, and I still don’t have a good sense for it. I can’t make my improvisations sound like jazz even if I try.
Another, bigger gap is rhythm: I have listened over the years to music from all over the world with interesting and complex rhythms, but I cannot explain those rhythms or reproduce them. The classical notation and theory I learned is not up to that task, either.
The biggest gap, in my mind, is my lack of exposure to any formal theory of melody. I like good melodies, I think I have a sense of some features that separate good melodies from drab ones, I think I am able to create pretty good melodies, but that all came from listening and experimentation and playing. I once (again, more than fifty years ago) looked through some music theory books in my college library that covered melody, but I didn’t get anything useful out of them.
The videos on music theory that crop up on my YouTube feed all seem to be about chords and scales. Maybe some music influencers should start producing in-depth content on rhythm and melody, too.
I may be wrong but I don't think there is a theory of melody in as there is go harmony or counterpoint. A good melody can't be constructed from rules. That's what makes them magical.
As I write this, I think when a melody sounds good it's likely related to the implied harmony in the notes being used, and obviously the expectations the listener gets and how they're handled. But I don't think there is a system of constructing good melodies in Western classical music theory.
I'd say that once you understand practical harmony, counterpoint, diminutions, common schemata, some basic elements of form, you've pretty much understood what classical music theory has to say about melody too. There's definitely an element of playing with expectations in a fully "creative" and rule-free way, but knowing the theory underneath is how you understand what the expectations are.
> To write tabs, you'll need to be able to make an educated guess at what's being played.
Knowing the theory certainly makes the process faster because you'll recognize patterns, but you can definitely work through most songs without knowing anything about music theory. Just pick up your guitar, slow the track down and try to reproduce the tones.
Back when I first started playing guitar, my teacher had me transcribe the melody to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (from memory). I didn't even know the major scale at that point, but by trial and error I improved my intuition for translating melodies in my head to the fretboard, which is remarkably useful as a guitarist, not only for improvisation, but for composition as well.
That's not to say that knowing music theory isn't helpful in transcribing and in general, but I wouldn't say it's a prerequisite. A lot of my foundation in music theory came from transcribing first and putting things together afterwards.
> I didn't even know the major scale at that point, but by trial and error
That is not productive.
Sure, you can do that once or twice.
But it gets painful quickly.
> but I wouldn't say it's a prerequisite.
I firmly believe it is a prerequisite.
Just by knowing what an interval is and playing that repeatedly, trains your brain to recognize it.
Specifically 1-3-5 interval range.
This is also one of those things that varies with the individual. When I was a kid taking cello lessons, I learned to play by ear. For classical students, theory doesn't really start until college.
I know very little theory, but I've been playing jazz for almost 50 years, and I know hundreds of melodies along with enough of their harmonies to improvise and accompany other players. Many people pick up tunes from the radio or hymns at church, even if they don't play an instrument.
I think a helpful tip for ear training is that you can do it without an instrument, just by hearing stuff (tunes, rhythms, accompanying parts) and trying to sing along. For beginners, this avoids the awkwardness of the instrument and its technique getting in the way.
If you develop your ear and learn your way around your instrument, then you can learn to play along by ear and then just write down what you're doing.
When I was 25 I started learning guitar, I'd play an hour a day consistently for about 4 years - at that point I was able to learn new songs by ear, noodle along to 80%~ of songs etc.
Guitar I've always found to be a super approachable instrument, particularly because online you can get a video demonstration for most songs. Compare to Piano which is pretty bias online towards sheet music and the ability to read that..
Tommy Emmanuel apparently learned by transrcibing, famously thinking that both the bass line and guitar lines he was hearing were a singular "guitar part". Just by having his expectations (incorrectly) raised, he rose to the occasion and played both parts.
I forget where I heard this story -- it's probably either rather famous, or buried in an interview somewhere.
The percussionist Trilok Gurtu has said the same thing about listening to many recordings as he was growing up. He just assumed that all the percussion was played by one person, all at once, and so he figured out ways to do it, even when it was 2 or even 3 people with overdubs.
Tommy drew a lot of inspiration from Chet Atkins who was really the pioneer of the bass+guitar "one hand band" style of playing. Tommy just improved on it a lot, adding more rhythmic elements, but to your point, yes, he was largely self-taught and driven to learn.
A variation on this is to use one of the many helpful tools, such as The Amazing Slowdowner. Easily loop over snippets and do the hard work of listening/transcribing, but without faffing around trying to rewind just the right amount.
This piece of software has been my goto on transcribing music for all of the instruments I play for the past 25 years. I can't recommend it enough. It has been pivotal in me being a better musician. Works on Linux, Mac and Windows.
Listening and transcribing is an excellent thing to do. But it would be terrible advice to say it's the only thing to do.
Also, I would argue that if you really want the benefit of transcribing, don't write it down until you have memorized whatever chunk you are transcribing - the act of memorizing it and learning it solely by ear is where the real value is.
On the other hand, this is not a good way to learn technique or the fretboard, as the easy keys will be vastly overrepresented, and you don't need to know where you are. That's a challenge that's almost unique to guitar and bass, and getting over that hump requires learning material by note name (whether from scores, tabs, or just chord symbols).
(my bonafides: 35 years playing, gig on sax, bass, piano, and percussion, currently doing an interdisciplinary PhD in music and CS, and running a jazz club night where I perform weekly)
"Keys" and "note names" literally only come up on the guitar when playing open strings. When playing fretted notes, the guitar is a completely relative instrument. You should focus on learning diatonic patterns of tones and semitones on the fretboard directly, not individual notes. It's a completely different method than the piano keyboard, which involves working within a fixed diatonic framework, and altering it to make "transposition" work. This meshes well with solfège and even more so with historical solmization, which are also highly relative methods (being intended originally for the voice).
I play electric and uptight jazz bass. While what you describe is possible for some genres, not knowing keys and the fretboard the same way you know keys on the piano is a non starter for jazz. All the competent jazz guitarists and bassists I know have this down cold. It's table stakes in my world.
It's still tabs, but marginally better because you're making your own tabs. Work on hearing the key and chord progression and you won't need tabs. You'll be able to jam with anyone, anytime. It'll take a couple months to get there, but you'll no longer rely on tabs - which I think is the goal.
When you are transcribing a guitar part you have to think about the key, the chords, and how to play the part efficiently. It's a great way to get a better understanding of the neck since there is usually more than one way to play a part.
Had a lot of fun contributing tabs to Ultimate Guitar, esp. when folks would write notes of appreciation. The harder the better - not cheating to slow down the track to understand rapid lick in solos (the Steely Dan ones were a gas) either. You lose a little bit of the magic (little is off limits with some practice) but the fact that you can figure out your favorite tracks and imagine yourself up on stage is fun.
I learned this way myself without being told. I was gifted a nearly ruined classical guitar that my mom took to a music shop and a guy got into working condition for $20. I then listened to every record, cassette and CD in our house looking for any guitar I could hear, especially individual notes, and learned dozens of songs.
It is painstaking and tedious, but it works. I look back on that time, the first few years I played, and I am genuinely surprised at some of the difficult songs I worked through in this way.
But now, over 30 years later and still playing regularly, I almost never do a note-for-note transcription of other peoples playing. I tend to either just get the gist of the harmony and melody by listening and get into the general ballpark. I often use ultimate guitar or other tab sites just for an outline of the chords (or download sheets from real books for jazz).
But my aim is always to fully memorize a piece, from beginning to end, so I can play it without any reference. That, for me, is the goal. Any way I get there (tabs, sheets, ear, demonstration, etc.) works fine in my books.
You will improve what you practice, possibly. This is advice for learning to play by ear. I was given the exact opposite advice by my classical guitar teacher in college because I was playing one thing and hearing something else. Sometimes, practice makes you worse or is a waste of time at best. If I could give better advice, it would be to be brutally mindful of what you are playing. Record it, and hear what is there. If it isn’t painful, you probably aren’t practicing.
No need for absolute pitch. All you need is relative pitch. You play a note, compare to the note you heard, maybe even play them at the same time. And then change the note till you find the right one.
How do you do that with chords? I know everyone who isn't completely tone deaf can do that with one single note. But when it comes to chords, unless you already know some music theory, aren't there infinite number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?
In some genres there are an infinite number. Most of the music regular people listen to is diatonic though and uses either power chords or triads, and then there are not that many options.
You don't have to get it right. If you know the basic guitar chords in the open positions, you can sort of play along to the vast majority of popular songs. As your hearing, knowledge of the neck, and maybe music theory improves you will start to recognise more things.
The point is not a perfect outcome. The point is the effort.
> infinite number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?
Kinda, but on Guitar, most pop songs are major/minor, possible sevenths. I think this post is aimed at someone who can read tab, but isn't "good" (what ever that means) so they should have an understanding of basic chord shapes.
The post does imply that this only really works if you can comfortably read tab, which is probably 6month-2 years of work (part time)
I thought the same for a long time and it really discouraged me. My natural pitch recognition is pretty bad.
What helped was starting with very simple melodies and songs, so I could get familiar with the most common movements. That made it easier to figure out progressions, because I learned how to narrow down the options.
I’m still not great at it, but I keep improving. That’s why I think it’s trainable.
I started learning guitar using tabs. It's good for easily picking up a song, but I found it painful to learn new songs. Everything I played I simply memorized and learning a new song was always a start from scratch.
I mostly play classical guitar and now force myself to get better at sight reading standard music notation. I find it extremely hard but very rewarding because I'm now able to simply pick up a sheet of music and with a couple of tries figure out the basics of a piece. It opens up a whole library of beautiful pieces.
Same, I finally managed to stick with learning standard notation this year after several false starts and I’m kicking myself I didn’t start earlier. There were a few tough moments where it seemed like I’d never get (learning about key signatures, moving past 1st position) but now I’m starting to get comfortable playing up to the 7th position. It’s so nice being able to just buy a big book of Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi studies or even some Bach transcriptions and play them straight out of the book instead of needing to listen to a performance first and then look at the tab.
I'm working on becoming a better piano player and forcing myself to read sheet music. To your point, it's incredibly difficult. To the point that I'm 50/50 about whether I'll ever get good enough for it to matter. I'm learning songs, but in nearly every case I'm mostly memorizing the song. It's really frustrating.
I've been advised to use a keyboard to record my playing without being able to hear it and playing straight from the sheet music. I haven't tried it yet though.
I also came to the realization after making this that my time was better spent transcribing, but I wanted to learn egui (and this was before coding agents, so it actually took some time).
There should be a saying like "A tool is not the task" similar to "A map is not the land." As professional tool makers it can be easy to replace the task with a tool in theory, but that's not reality.
In a similar vein I think that's why there are so many devs making game engines instead of games.
57yo here who started guitar from scratch 16 months ago, with zero musical background. For my fellow players, I'm at the stage where barre chords are playable but switching between them quickly is still tough.
I studied exclusively with an app (Yousician) for the first 13 months, then got a local teacher I see once a week. I practice 45-60 minutes a day and have only missed a few days in the last 16 months.
In my experience, it all comes down to practice. There is no magic forumula or shortcut. The 2000 hours to passable playing is very much accurate. I track that chart nearly perfectly.
It's very much a sprint-plateau experience. This week I was trying to learn the chords in Clapton's "Old Love" and for 6 days I could not switch between them, then on the 7th day I was able to make the leap. There's a bunch of brain science about consolidating memories and such but...it all comes down to practice.
I agree with the sentiment that you have to practice correctly, but even if you learn bad habits, more practice and challenging yourself will weed them out. It's really crucial to always challenge yourself. Practice is doing hard things, not playing things you already know. You have to separate practice from playing, because they're two different things. Yes, there's a value in picking up the guitar and fooling around, but to really get better, you have to challenge yourself constantly.
Guitar is a game of millimeters, to an extent I never appreciated. This is where a local teacher can be hugely helpful. How you position your hand, where your thumb is, the arch in different knuckles, how much you're pressing down, how you are positioning that barring finger, where your right hand is, etc. - it's all extreme fine-tuning.
It's massively rewarding. But the learning curve is brutal. I practice for an hour at mid-day and would never have imagined the incredible health benefits in terms of stress relief. It's an hour (to borrow a Steely Dan quote, albeit not in its original drug context) "time out of mind" where I'm doing something completely orthogonal to the rest of my life, for no reason except to hone a skill and enjoy.
I HIGHLY recommend keeping a journal and noting every day what you did. Day by day you'll think "I'm not improving at all, I suck, maybe I'm getting worse"...then you look and realize how much progress you've made compared to two months ago, etc.
BTW, my daughter, 16, practices half as much as I do or less, yet learns 2-3x as fast because she has a long younger brain.
And because she does less things in her day? Letting the brain process the instrument playing during day and night, not a bunch of other stuff. I’m sure brain age matters a lot but I think it’s a bit overrated. Probably a lot to do with environment as well.
I've been playing guitar for 30+ years. When I was a kid, I learned almost everything by ear - note by note by note...
In hindsight, once I had learned a song, I had actually learned MUCH more than just that song. It is that "extra" that adds up over time and makes one a guitarist and not just someone who can play some songs on the guitar.
Personally prefer to search for guitar tabs of things I can barely play. And also sound terrible while playing them and tense my whole body while doing so. This is the point of playing the guitar, RIGHT?
Upon hearing Eruption for the first time, the story goes that Tony MacAlpine learned to play the finger tapping section by PICKING IT because he didn't know finger tapping was a thing. Only after seeing Van Halen in concert did he realize what Eddie was doing.
If memory serves me right, I read this in either Guitar Player or Guitar World magazine back in the late 80s or early 90s. Whether Tony was embellishing or not is unknown.
Similarly, Ben Travers didn't have a delay pedal, so learned to pick the delayed parts on Pink Floyd's "Run like hell" when he was younger, since taken to ludicrous speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CY0_HG8J5M
I learned to play guitar this way -- listening to CDs and scrubbing back and forth, writing down what I heard. It's great, but it only gets you so far. Learning pentatonic scales was a step-change for me.
First, figure out the bass line. That typically suggests the chord progression. If you know your chords, then, for simple songs, you have the rhythm figured out.
For solos, it's more tricky. If you aren't familiar with common soloing patterns (licks) and/or scales then start with simple solos and work your way up.
I am playing for quite a while... Had private lessons with a coach to practice solo guitar, and general understanding for a couple of years. Before that around 10 years or more as amateur, now it's been 3 years since I spoke to a guitar coach last time.
I play every day, I do my solos, I play blues, I don't need chords. But it's hard.
Just don't underestimate how hard it is - to be able to play any solo by ear. I guess I just don't have any freaking talent. Pretty obvious at this point, since some people do a better progress in 3-5 years of work.
But for me it's not. I realized that for me something isn't just clicking. There was no breakthrough moment I expected all these years.
I invested a lot into playing guitar, but... meh. Honestly, I wish I spent all that time learning AI math or just math in general. Or spend my time on something that would have a better ROI.
Looking back I see how much effort it took, and how low my ROI is. I wish I gave up earlier.
This is a great way of phrasing it -- ROI. My mom is a violin teacher and when I asked her if I could learn, she said "no, you don't have the hands for it". She recommended something like guitar would be better for me.
Not everyone can do everything, nor is everything a good return on investment. If you tell people they can do whatever they want, you are effectively wasting their time. Better to give them some useful advice, e.g. your fingers are better for the guitar, rather than insisting everyone can do everything.
Everyone can do much better than they think though.
My daughter's violin teacher refused to teach any adult because according to him if you're too old you're a lost cause ;) I agree an adult is likely not going to be the world's top violinist but I'm also sure that with enough work you can make vast improvements.
On both the guitar and on the violin you are not magically going to get to your max potential. It requires a lot of work. On the guitar you can get to a point where you can play simple songs relatively quickly. On the violin you do sound awful for much longer so it does require a lot more work to get to a reasonable level. Whether that's worth your time or not depends on you.
I can hear a tune and immediately sing it or whistle it. But I can't immediately play it on the guitar. It's much easier for children than adults.
It's also hard to force yourself to practice the relevant skills. You can play scales all day but that won't necessarily help your ear. What you need is to force your brain to make the connection.
I mean, it kind of sounds like you hated the whole process and didn't care about the result either. What was your reason for taking up the guitar as a hobby in the first place?
I suspect it's actually impossible to get reasonably good at something without some amount of passion for it, to some degree or another. Most musicians are in it for the thrill of learning something that most people find hard to do, or because they love music, or because they want to be part of a community that values music. Occasionally because they think they can make money at it.
I play an instrument or two, but only for fun. I love music, but I'm at a point in my life where I will never be good enough to be in a band. I have enough other hobbies anyway. I take a random 15 minutes out of my day to play a few songs, maybe practice a new song I'm learning, watch a short Youtube video about it here and there, and that's enough for me.
I can't imagine you can do it for many years without a passion. I'm saying that when it comes to playing an insrument, there is definitely a concept of a talent involved. If you're not talented, you ain't gonna reach stars even if you spend 10-15 years doing it with passion.
You're getting dunked on a little bit in the replies, but your point of view is important for people to read. Not everyone is capable of learning every skill, and practice is necessary but insufficient. I've been on and off trying to learn a foreign language for decades, and it just doesn't click, no matter what I try (formal lessons, immersion, book study, apps). I used to have the "Just practice, bro" attitude, but I've done a 180 over the years and I have a lot of empathy and understanding now when my own kid complains "I just can't learn this."
It's also about how you practice. It's true that not everyone can get to any level at any skill. But it's also true we underestimate our abilities and potential almost universally. That said where you invest your limited time and what you enjoy and want to work on is totally up to you. But often "I can't do it" is just an excuse or a mindset or not having found the workaround or the right approach (where a teacher can sometimes help).
I was always pretty curious about what's gonna happen next :) Like one year more into that - will it make me fundamentally better or not? If you understand fretboard - will it make you better or not? If you learn the scales, if you practice them, etc... I was (and still am) looking for something that would hopefully glue all of that together.
Don't get me wrong, I produced a couple of songs, some people say they're pretty good. But honestly, it's a crap.
I'm a new player so I'm not asking this to be snarky but to understand. How can you think you don't need chords? It seems to me, 5 months into my journey, that chords are a fundamental aspect of guitar. It sounds like someone taking up golf but saying they don't need putts. Can you help me understand?
> When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down
How do you do that with chords? I know everyone who isn't completely tone deaf can do that with one single note. But when it comes to chords, unless you already know some music theory, aren't there huge number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?
There's some analogy around learning to play a song without using your ears and painting without using your eyes. Like the silliness on the drawing side is obvious. The benefits gained by using your ears to learn music (again this is such a silly statement when you think about it) are so huge and so overlooked by so many beginner guitar players. An hour of learning by ear is worth a week of reading. Also, as I see it, youtube is full of perpetual teachers looking for perpetual students; being a perpetual student sucks. All you need is records.
The most important ingredient is time. Just make sure you do something regularly. At the beginning you may just care about making anything that works and measures up to stuff you like, but the truest truth is that you can't start getting into a thing and expect your taste to remain the same.
As you learn more about the instrument you will learn more about what you like and it will eventually shift. There are people where this is not the case, but they are rare and they don't make better or worse music than others.
You may also start to notice more and more that the guitar playing was the simpler part in most music you like,the harder part was how it all came together as a band, how it was composed and recorded and mixed. Guitar players the world over try to compete with sounds that have run through microphones, mixing consoles, channel strips, mixed with other instruments and mastered. And some of them can't even hear where the guitar ends and where the bass guitar starts. So you have generations of guitar players chasing dragons and spending a ton of money on gear that gets them nowhere.
Gear isn't nearly as important as anybody makes it out to be, especially if you go your own way. And that is my recommendation: Go your own way. Sure copy others for learning, but develope your own sound, style of playing, your own music.
Learn to play by ear. Practice scales. Practice arpeggios. Learn open chords. Learn barre chords. Learn moveable shapes. Learn to move among chord shapes. Practice with a metronome. Find people to play with. Learn to read music. Learn to sight read. Do all of these things and you will be a musician.
There are a bunch of ear training quizzes online and I believe also YouTube videos.
I don't think this is a general requirement for learning the guitar. It's just one aspect. For most people whether you can hear that something is a 3rd or a 5th shouldn't impact their ability to play songs and have fun on the guitar. A sense of rhythm is maybe more important. If you can whistle a tune or sing along anywhere close to a song you're probably ok.
I’m a banjo player. Starting with tab ( and playing for myself ) quickly got me to a certain level and then ingrained some bad habits. Playing by ear is much better.
One way that seems to work really well:
1. Listen to the song, tap the rhythm to learn it.
2. Figure the chord progression.
3. Using standard rolls ( sequence of notes, one measure ) find how to fit in melody notes
I lived near a music school and took proper guitar lessons. After getting down the basics from the Alfred Method book, this was the homework my guitar teacher gave me.
Coincidentally enough, I was also transcribing RATM back then too...
TLDR: practice. If you have sufficient natural talent xor will, you will eventually go past the canon of available material and begin to transcribe your own. Then there are those who move to creation, either immediately or somewhere in the path.
This brought to mind a quote from Ira Glass:
> Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
I think listening and transcribing is great advice. Careful listening will help to improve your own listening ability and taste. It also helps to demystify why something is great.
But it's also going to be a struggle - especially at first. You have to be prepared to struggle, a LOT. Most people won't be able to keep at it, and that's one of the things that separates the greats from everyone else.
I'm a jazz musician, and my kids are both professional classical players. I've asked them why they don't learn to play jazz. My daughter described pretty much what Glass is saying here. She calls it "fear of sucking." She knows what good jazz improvisation sounds like, and trying to make herself do it is pretty discouraging.
Not that there's anything wrong with loving and playing classical music, which is a factor too.
This may be why it's different when you start very young. You're not conscious of your own sucking, you just play, usually in a setting where everybody's congratulating you. For sucking. ;-)
I started on classical, and got into jazz by accident, as a bassist. It turns out that you can function in a band as a bassist without having to improvise very much, so I was able to learn at my own pace and eventually did. In fact a lot of good jazz players started out in school jazz bands or large ensembles where you didn't have to be a good improviser right up front.
I picked up Violin as an adult, have done recitals, and I suck. Being able to suck and find joy in something anyway even if you're not top nth percentile is a valuable life skill.
I think it's pretty frustrating if the songs/pieces you actually want to play are demanding or even at the virtuoso level.
If you really want to play a David Gilmour guitar solo or sing some Led Zeppelin, it better not suck because it won't hit the mark at all.
For me, the reason to pick up the guitar as a kid was to play stuff I liked, stuff that turned out not to be that easy, and every time I play, I feel that gap of where I feel I should be to respect the music I'm trying to play.
I wish I had more your attitude.
Rick Beato did a video about being able to identify guitarists by a single note. David Gilmour was by far the easiest to recognize. I got me wondering how much work would it take to even be able to play a single note as well as David Gilmour. And even then I would still only be imitating someone, not creating something original.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gESY87hn7_Q
There's plenty of good stuff that's hard to play, but there's also so much good stuff that's relatively easy.
It's also obvious to me that at this point I'm never going to reach the virtuoso level even if I really wanted to, but so what? I suck, but whenever I manage to play something that I couldn't before it brings me joy.
So many things in life are better if you can get past that fear of not being good. Because very very few people can skip the stage where they are not good. (I'd be comfortable saying nobody. But there is always somebody, it seems.)
This is so true! I think as kids we naturally don't mind doing something creative and it not working out well, but as adults, we worry too much about seeming competent.
In a career, seeming competent can be valuable, but for learning something new and creative, it often just creates a barrier to getting started.
I tell my Mentees one of the greatest skills is getting good at not being good at something. Being comfortable being uncomfortable.
This is good advice for most human activities. I told my students these exact words (you gotta get comfortable being uncomfortable) countless times when teaching math and physics.
Can attest to this.
I picked up singing 4 years ago (I’m 42 now), starting from nothing, and I’ve been taking regular lessons. I still suck. But I suck slightly less than I did when I was starting, and what motivates me is the sheer joy that it brings. I just hope it lasts.
"Dude, sucking at something is the first step at being sorta good at someting" - Jake the Dog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gu8YiTeU9XU
Stephen King said something similar (but I'm sure I'm misquoting): Every writer begins with one million terrible words inside them. The sooner you get those words out, the sooner you get to the good stuff.
A lot of us don't turn out to be professional musicians, writers or athletes. In between family and work, you start to realize how much these people put in to be at the top of their game. Time and effort you can't really put in if you didn't make the jump and have other life commitments.
I guess that's why a lot of people grow old wondering what life would have been if they would have followed through on whatever talent they appeared to possess in youth.
I was at a dance hall the other day, and this young lady came floating in. It's hard to describe how she walked - just like she was effortlessly gliding. It looks easy, but anyone else would look like a moose trying it.
It's the result of a lifetime of ballet dancing. Probably 10,000 hours, at least.
I was just in awe.
Not to counter your point, but you must have never seen moose moving at speed through a forest. They are astonishingly graceful and surprisingly quiet.
It's not just the 10,000 hours, it's learning it very young.
I am an ex-professional ballet dancer, and one of the things I always find interesting is that any experienced ballet dancer can instantly tell who trained as a child and who didn't solely by how they stand (literally not even moving) at the barre. But the thing is, children with only a few years of training under their belt will often show this good form, while I have literally never seen someone who started as an adult, even dedicated adults who take class 4-5 times a week, get rid of that "I started as an adult" posture.
As an example, I was actually quite impressed at how Natalie Portman really managed to "look the part" in her role as a ballerina in Black Swan. Still, she wasn't fooling anyone with training - even with just a simple port de bras (raising of an arm), you could easily tell she wasn't a dancer.
My partner's also a dance, and this is what's always come across from her, too - that you can tell a dancer from a glance in an instant, even on the street. I have a little bit of an eye for it but only by virtue of being around that environment.
(also: ex-pro ballet to HN? Can't imagine there's much crossover in that Venn!)
I'm not in the least surprised by that. Bones in children are softer and more malleable, they don't harden up until 16 or so. (That's why young athletes should stick to more reps and lighter weights until 16.)
I've tried emulating those movements, and just look like Bullwinkle.
funny, surfing is like this too
Another incident: I was stepping out of my ride to the airport, and noticed another woman pulling her luggage out of the trunk of a car. I remarked "I bet you're a ballet dancer." She said "nope, I'm an ice dancer!" Funny I could tell just by the way she wrangled the luggage.
and I'm on my knees looking for the answer
Killer reply
???
It’s a song
“Are we human or are we dancer”
thank you
I just started photography last year and it makes much sense. This and: - do it with intention, to copy or simulate to learn how to do what you want. If you just go out and take random pictures you will not learn much. If you go and try to simulate some style, lightning, you learn a lot. I also think most of my pictures really suck even if i try. But then i look on pictures of someone who has "photographer" in profile with couple thousand subscribers and most of their pictures also suck. I hope one day to bridge the gap.
> Most people won't be able to keep at it
I always tell people the secret to learning guitar fast is to practice for a minimum of 5 minutes a every day for 20 years. It's simultaneously a gross oversimplification while also literally being the only way to do it.
I think another aspect is regarding fundamentals. In order to stay engaged in the early years, you will skip over the minutia. But to achieve the next level, you must go back and drill the fundamentals, unlearning any bad habits in the process. Only then, once you’ve “learned the rules”, can you then surpass/break them.
This works for programming as well. I’ve spent countless hours reimplementing things or cloning things just to learn how they work. Sometimes mine is better than the original, sometimes it’s not. But regardless, I learn a lot along the way and occasionally get to teach something as well. It’s a great way to learn new languages, new concepts, new systems.
Are you implying some people don't have taste, or less of it?
I like to call it interest. What makes something interesting to some that I'm not sure.
Taste absolutely can and does evolve the more you play. It doesn't mean that everyone taste evolves towards one absolute taste, people stay different.
I kinda think it applies to all artistic hobbies. On one hand you learn a practical hands-applying skill, on another hand you learn how to express yourself and/or listen to expression of others in chosen medium. And, well, the more you look at something, the more you see. The more you see, the more you know your own preferences.
What's even more funny, the "detail perception" skill doesn't always sync to your guitar skill. So (for me at least) there are times when I'm thinking I'm the hottest stuff around (because I just mastered something I deemed important), and there are times when I'm down because my detail perception suddenly got better and turns out I would prefer to play with more nuance (but didn't learn how to yet)
I've picked up a couple languages relatively easily and I 100% attribute it to the fact that I have no shame - zero
I will speak in my ugly, broken, American accent and do it til I improve. I didn't read about this technique in a book or anything, I simply mirrored what I saw kids do and IMO a big reason kids do well with picking up language (aside from all the physiological stuff) is that they actual speak it - they aren't concerned about whether it sounds like baby talk or not
A lot of advice feels trite and cliche, like keep trying, etc - but often times it takes repetition and hearing the message in many different ways before it sinks. As a tangent - this is the value i found in therapy too - a great therapist that was patient and consistent in their messaging day in and day out eventually led to some of what they said sinking in.
I also picked up a couple languages as an adult and can attest to this. You have to be willing to talk and know you are butchering the language. Nobody cares either. People are genuinely pleased to hear the effort, especially if you're a guest in their country.
I guess you never tried to speak French in France.
This is more of urban legend that may somewhat hold true in tourist-heavy areas.
I’m French, this is definitely not an urban legend, for some unknown reason « wrongly » spoken French sounds especially grating to me and all the other French people I know. We might not say it to your face , but it is extremely hard to ignore. I wonder if it’s the same with other Latin languages, or if it is just some consequence of years of forced standardisation of the French accent.
I would assume it's grating for anybody to hear their mother tongue butchered. More so when both sides know they could just switch English and have an adult conversation instead of struggling to buy a loaf of broad and a bottle of water. I always feel the urge to switch and have to remind myself that the other person is making a big effort on their side and that should be appreciated and respected.
P.S. My mother tongue is Spanish and it's many accents are anything but standardized.
Do you know the source for this quote? I would love to read more, if there is more.
It's from this! https://youtu.be/X2wLP0izeJE?si=jwmFevXkDPbkfejV
That reminds me of an interview I heard with comicbook artist Chip Zdarsky. He was talking about how we all love to draw as kids, but eventually around 10 years old or so we start to become aware that what we see in our heads isn't anywhere near what's appearing on the page in our drawings, and that gap acts as a powerful filter discouraging most people from pursuing art any further.
I’ve transcribed hundreds of hours of guitar music over 25+ years, using the method described in this article. It was such a slog that I ended up creating tool to help streamline the process: Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/).
It combines audio playback directly with a tab editor, so that you can immediately write down what you’ve figured out and your transcription stays in sync with the original audio. This makes transcribing incredibly fast and (importantly) accurate.
It’s got audio slowdown, precise looping, “synth overlay” (playback of the transcription and original audio at the same time, to spot errors), auto stem separation and a full-featured tab/notation editor with support for hundreds of notations.
When you’re done, you get a very useful artifact: a synced transcription, effectively a bespoke practice environment for that piece of music.
Over the years, Soundslice has expanded into a lot more than a pure transcription tool, but lots of people still use it for its original intended purpose. (It supports any instrument that uses western music notation, not just guitar.) If you’re at all interested in transcribing music, give it a shot.
How have i never heard about this, will definitely give a try. What about a DAW integrated transcription tool, as a VST maybe, is it too niche? This is something i always wanted and never really found in the capacity i needed, essentially doing what soundslice does both track per track and also having the full score, most tools available try to convert to midi via usual methods or do some mumbo-jumbo AI to write the score. Since 90% of recording musicians time is spent on a DAW and sometimes having everything in the box streamlines the work a lot.
One truth I've observed from decades of keen hobbyist involvement in guitar music and playing is that a lifetime of music is largely an individual journey.
The fact that some players learn by transcribing, while others learn by jamming, and yet others learn by rote theoretical study, or 10-hour practice sessions, etc, is a big part of the variety which results in the wonderfully varied tapestry of music styles and approaches that humanity creates and enjoys.
Not to take away from the age-old, valid advice in the link about the value of ear-to-fretboard work.
That’s it.
The individual who has a breakthrough often feels compelled to call it a “system” and start telling others about it.
The great advice someone has is just what worked for them. It will probably work for others, especially if it repeats common advice, but it won’t work for everyone.
There’s also a causal bias here.
If I practice guitar for 6 hours a day (like John Petrucci in his teenage years) while always wearing an orange hat, I’ll get pretty damn good at the guitar in a few years. I can then spread the word to everyone that the best way to learn the guitar is to always wear an orange hat.
As with the dangers of ‘productivity porn’, ultimately what matters most is putting in the hours.
Right. It is all about the time you put in.
But one thing I like to stress is: You get to decide how to spend that time. Sure it is occasionally good to spend the time on "no fun" practise, especially if you feel your playing is lacking. But you don't get magically better results if you suffer while practising.
I'd argue the opposite: The person who has fun while practising will also learn and they will be inclined to put more hours in.
My take is that there are probably multiple systems out there than can help you achieve mastery, but it depends on your personality, life circumstances, etc. Just like there ten thousand paths up the mountain. It is a good idea to try out a couple and find the one that works for you. Then if you get to the point where you master your target skill and it is your turn to spread the gospel of "the way", it is good to keep in mind why it worked for you.
I can’t imagine stopping every note. I think it is pretty good practice for me to never stop if one can avoid it.
I used to stop all the time, when I made a mistake, between repetitions, when I finished the piece.
I agree about ear to fretboard.
I think you need both. If you never stop or slow down, it's hard to build the proper muscle memory to improve and get more accurate. However, it's also valuable to practice playing through mistakes to finish a whole song. Mistakes happen, and if you're playing for a crowd you can't just stop and start over.
Yes, both. A good example why is for example, as muscle memory grows it will bias your note selection when improvising. Sometimes you really need to slow down to consciously force yourself to explore other sounds. Once you've done that, you need to wear it in again so it sounds natural in your playing.
Absolutely. You can get "locked in" to certain patterns / phrases just via muscle memory and familiarity. Need to balance that with a little improv to find new patterns phrases you like, and then can train those in via muscle memory.
I repeatedly play the same phrase though.
Everyone learns different, but there is something universal in music that is essential to mastering an instrument. You should be able to hear something in your head and then play it. The goal is there is no barrier between your thoughts and actions. Learning to play by ear like that is the best way to get there in pretty much all instances. Looking up tabs is still great, and you can learn a ton from that (huh? another song with G, C, and D, I wonder why? Is it similar to the C, F, and G songs I'm playing?) but if you want to get next level that is the best way. I am a guitar play and I was in a band with another guitar player. I had a music minor, thousands of hours of practice and knew my theory inside and out. The other guitar player barely knew any theory but was way better than me and one of the best guitar players I've ever heard. He could just play. He didn't need to know the theory, he could hear it in his head.
Sting famously learned to play bass using this sort of technique with music on LPs, lifting the needle and dropping it back a bit in the track over and over again as he gradually worked out the notes and fingering.
Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
I started playing electric bass in college, around 1984. I too used the record and lifting the needle technique. The only reason I'm commenting is that early on I learned a LOT of Police songs. Why? Because
(1) the songs were already in my head,
(2) Sting would have two or three cool hooks per song, and this is the important part,
(3) the hooks would played over and over during the song. That meant I could play the song all the way through and get to practice each riff 10 times or more with just a single needle lift.
A prime example: Demolition Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf7To6vdg7A)
> Probably almost any method is effective at learning guitar, as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
There are a few pedagogical points here to keep in mind:
first, there are local maxima in terms of learning something like guitar where you get bad habits and the only way to progress is to undo them.
Also, different ways of learning have different values in terms of what goals you're aiming towards and very importantly what kind of practice will keep you motivated in a sustainable way. Sometimes, taking shortcuts in some ways means you might slow down your growth rate but you'll have better overall growth because you'll keep at it for longer
> first, there are local maxima in terms of learning something like guitar where you get bad habits and the only way to progress is to undo them.
I'm not convinced for guitar. Some of the fastest and most famous guitarists had shockingly bad technique.
As long as you're not injuring yourself, practice and determination pretty much overcomes everything.
> Some of the fastest and most famous guitarists had shockingly bad technique.
The universe didn't offer a manual on how to play guitar, so how are you determining that their technique was bad? Given what you say about them, maybe they actually had the perfect technique?
The universe didn’t offer a manual, but mankind has largely arrived at some orthodoxy for the most efficient and ergonomic ways to fret, bend, pluck, tap, strum, etc. In many cases, these are objectively better techniques to use once mastered, but they’re not the only way.
I see this "bad technique" angle expressed quite often when talking about self-learning. I tend to think it is overblown a bit. I started learning piano by myself during covid. Then I went to two teachers. Neither one had anything bad to say about my technique.
> as long as it includes the key factor - time spent practicing.
And at least for me, frequency beats duration. I make more progress when I play consistently for even 10 minutes every day than when I play for 90 minutes on Sunday afternoon.
Add some distance and sensitivity. I used blunt / brute force repetitions and somehow wasted years. Music is very subtle, and keeping a focus on small details is worth thousands of hours.
My music teacher said that practice does not produce perfection, only perfect practice produces perfection.
If you mess up, redo the part you messed up correctly 5 times in a row.
And, don't just practice the easy stuff. You have to challenge yourself to grow.
>If you mess up, redo the part you messed up correctly 5 times in a row.
I think it may be important to note _when_ to redo this. I started off this way, but after working with a guitar teacher (a Berklee graduate), he recommended that I continue on with the song and return to the problematic parts afterwards. If you constantly stop at the problematic parts to replay them and get it right, you'll have no idea what other parts you'll have trouble with further into the song until much later. In addition to that, being able to move on and continue playing the song after making a mistake is an important skill itself. If you build that skill, it's usually only other musicians that will notice -- a regular audience won't.
What's your take on it?
I can be pretty bizarre without even trying, I'll take both ;)
Practice makes perfect is a thing, but that's not exactly rehearsal.
With practice you expect to improve, broaden, or maintain instrumental or musical ability for the long term. There should be no deadlines or need for actual listenability.
OTOH rehearsal is the run-up to a smooth listenable performance with a decidedly short-term objective by comparison. Unless you are rehearsing to absolute perfection, you do not halt for anything, the show must go on and that in itself requires you to practice covering up and compensating for your mistakes or shortcomings as you go along.
With practice you are actually trying to become a better player overall, but rehearsal is more about making the next performance as good as it can be and that's it.
If you're not actually as good as you would like in either regard, having a bit of commitment to simulating what you need most can give some direction itself to add to the mix.
As somebody who started teaching himself guitar as a teenager, put it down for 10+ years and started back up, this resonates.
Everything takes twice as long to learn because I first have to unlearn the old habits.
Yes. Put another way: Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
And as my music professor once said: "If you sound good while practicing, then you're not practicing."
Guess I’m practicing right
Time is the largest factor though. Some ways are better than others but there is no substitiute for time.
why am I posting here instead of practicing?
Practice make permanent.
practice makes perverts
That's called ear training and it's crucial. I don't think all ways one can play and call it "practice" are equal
Wow, Justin with his hair!
Been plucking at the guitar (literally and figuratively - trying to learn) for a couple of years now and Justin's (free) course was the best I've found. His videos are compassionate, funny, explain things really well and easy to follow. He also dog-fed the instructions by learning to play left-handed (and posted those videos as well, hilarious to watch).
Compared to that, some time earlier I subscribed to a Berklee free course on Coursera (iirc) - Beginner guitar. Felt like a fumbling idiot, almost never touched guitar afterwards.
Really recommended: https://www.justinguitar.com/
Another 10/10 free course is Scotty West’s Absolutely Understand Guitar on YouTube. Filmed in the 90s and it’s still one of the best classes out there.
I second that. Switched to piano, however there is no better course for a quitar than Justin's.
Do you have a recommendation for a piano/keyboard one?
The way I learned guitar:
1. Lessons for 6 months, didn't learn much.
2. Started playing cover tunes, did that extensively for years. Practiced by butt off. Played with a lot of different people.
3. Went back to learning theory.
For me my main motivation to learn guitar was to play in a band, not to become good at the guitar itself. But it turned out that I was talented enough to learn a lot by just screwing around. When I went back to learn theory, I already knew the sounds and patterns - I just didn't a name for them.
With that said, If I could go back, I'd just start with learning all the notes on the fretboard, all the basic chord and scale shapes. It's actually not that hard, but you need motivation.
I've played with hundreds of other guitarists since then, given lessons, played session etc. and one of my early surprises was how many different reasons people had to learn the guitar. I just assumed everyone were like me - wanted to jam and play cool tunes. But then I met some really good players that had zero interest in playing with others, play cover songs in general, or even write songs. They were perfectly happy with exploring theory, for the sake of theory - the complete opposite of myself at the time.
> With that said, If I could go back, I'd just start with learning all the notes on the fretboard, all the basic chord and scale shapes. It's actually not that hard, but you need motivation.
I agree, but if the guitar is someone's first instrument it may also be their only creative outlet or seen as a means to an end. They're almost guaranteed to do what you did and probably even skip the lessons.
I think the physical act of playing an instrument is very overrated, and music education is underrated. Even just a few years of putting kids in the school band goes a long way. Being familiar with sightreading and basic music theory sounds boring, but it makes everything else a breeze when they want to learn something on their own.
Of course, there are also tons of people who were in a bad program and it was worse than nothing for their motivation. That's another topic though.
It’s a great article on something that’s useful, but a bit overconfident in its universality. Better at what? There are many dimensions to being a guitar player. Is it technique? Theory? Ability to pickup a song by ear (this article)? Better at playing in a group? Better at playing solo? Better at reading music? Better at accurate bends? Better at fingerpicking?
One of the nice things about music is you can’t get good at ALL of it. You have to pick where to focus. I’ll also say, you might need to ask yourself if you want to get better. I love relaxing by reading through the chords on a new song and playing it. I already have a job, and the time I truly have for intentional practice is like once a month. Most people are not studying to become guitar pros but to enjoy their time with the instrument. If that is your goal let joy be your guide. Perhaps some short term pain is part of that journey but really weigh out what you want out of the experience.
My appoach is more focused on continuity rather than stop-analyze-go style suggested on this article. Select a song, get a well sounding tab of that song, pick a section, loop it slow enough so you can reasonably hit the notes, once you play it well speed it up and repeat this until 120% speed, repeat this whole process for all sections and you're done.
Recognizing melodies by ear is a hugely useful skill, but I can't help but think it's going to be nearly impossible to do without a sound foundation in music theory.
Tabs are, in large part, paint-by-number. Lots of guitarists out there are only interested in learning a song. Regardless of key, mode, or what the notes actually are. And, tabs satisfy that group by saying: "Play this fret on this string".
To write tabs, you'll need to be able to make an educated guess at what's being played. ex. "Is that a minor pentatonic scale? Or are they arpeggiating a minor 7th chord?". If terms like that aren't in your musical vocabulary, and you haven't played enough to recognize the difference, I don't see how a guitarist would even begin writing their own tabs. Maybe the author is assuming this skill set.
> you haven't played enough to recognize the difference
I think the key bit here is that this is aimed at someone who is proficient, but not "good" ie can play tab, but not much else.
I think its perfectly possible to transcribe if you don't "know" musical theory, but for guitar, you should need to know chord shapes.
The key or mode is probably not actually that important, because you are transcribing rather then improvising. Obviously it will reduce the search space considerably if you do know what key/mode its in.
But you'd be surprised at how much musical theory is innate, or at lease learnt through listening.
Having learned guitar in a way that's somewhat similar to what's outlined in this article, I will say that someone doing this transcription-based method will likely naturally consolidate their "making tabs" into "making chords" pretty quickly, because the patterns occur often enough. I'd also say that producing your own tabs is very far away from a being a mere tab-consumer, it's just a natural introductory medium because tabs are very easily digestible to a beginner and, as you say, satisfy the craving.
I think that starting off with easy songs, and with enough brute force as you scale up, you can become organically familiar with these concepts to make the educated guesses you're talking about.
Many renowned musicians were able to effectively create music utilising these concepts despite never formally learning music theory, and by just learning by ear.
Learning formal music theory helped me a lot when I was a teenager playing guitar and piano, and having absorbed all that theory more than fifty years ago helps me to continue enjoy playing and improvising music now.
But over the years I realized that there were gaps in the Western classical theory I studied.
A relatively small one is that I never systematically studied jazz harmony, and I still don’t have a good sense for it. I can’t make my improvisations sound like jazz even if I try.
Another, bigger gap is rhythm: I have listened over the years to music from all over the world with interesting and complex rhythms, but I cannot explain those rhythms or reproduce them. The classical notation and theory I learned is not up to that task, either.
The biggest gap, in my mind, is my lack of exposure to any formal theory of melody. I like good melodies, I think I have a sense of some features that separate good melodies from drab ones, I think I am able to create pretty good melodies, but that all came from listening and experimentation and playing. I once (again, more than fifty years ago) looked through some music theory books in my college library that covered melody, but I didn’t get anything useful out of them.
The videos on music theory that crop up on my YouTube feed all seem to be about chords and scales. Maybe some music influencers should start producing in-depth content on rhythm and melody, too.
I may be wrong but I don't think there is a theory of melody in as there is go harmony or counterpoint. A good melody can't be constructed from rules. That's what makes them magical.
As I write this, I think when a melody sounds good it's likely related to the implied harmony in the notes being used, and obviously the expectations the listener gets and how they're handled. But I don't think there is a system of constructing good melodies in Western classical music theory.
I'd say that once you understand practical harmony, counterpoint, diminutions, common schemata, some basic elements of form, you've pretty much understood what classical music theory has to say about melody too. There's definitely an element of playing with expectations in a fully "creative" and rule-free way, but knowing the theory underneath is how you understand what the expectations are.
> To write tabs, you'll need to be able to make an educated guess at what's being played.
Knowing the theory certainly makes the process faster because you'll recognize patterns, but you can definitely work through most songs without knowing anything about music theory. Just pick up your guitar, slow the track down and try to reproduce the tones.
Back when I first started playing guitar, my teacher had me transcribe the melody to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (from memory). I didn't even know the major scale at that point, but by trial and error I improved my intuition for translating melodies in my head to the fretboard, which is remarkably useful as a guitarist, not only for improvisation, but for composition as well.
That's not to say that knowing music theory isn't helpful in transcribing and in general, but I wouldn't say it's a prerequisite. A lot of my foundation in music theory came from transcribing first and putting things together afterwards.
> I didn't even know the major scale at that point, but by trial and error
That is not productive. Sure, you can do that once or twice. But it gets painful quickly.
> but I wouldn't say it's a prerequisite.
I firmly believe it is a prerequisite. Just by knowing what an interval is and playing that repeatedly, trains your brain to recognize it. Specifically 1-3-5 interval range.
This is also one of those things that varies with the individual. When I was a kid taking cello lessons, I learned to play by ear. For classical students, theory doesn't really start until college.
I know very little theory, but I've been playing jazz for almost 50 years, and I know hundreds of melodies along with enough of their harmonies to improvise and accompany other players. Many people pick up tunes from the radio or hymns at church, even if they don't play an instrument.
I think a helpful tip for ear training is that you can do it without an instrument, just by hearing stuff (tunes, rhythms, accompanying parts) and trying to sing along. For beginners, this avoids the awkwardness of the instrument and its technique getting in the way.
If you develop your ear and learn your way around your instrument, then you can learn to play along by ear and then just write down what you're doing.
>For classical students, theory doesn't really start until college.
Well, unless, you are studying here in Hungary, for example, where it starts pretty much right away... (though it is a separate class).
You can figure it out by ear with music theory. You use different terms but who cares. Theory is useful of course but not required.
There is a good graph for transitions that works well for learning since it is a process of forced change.
https://cdn.shrm.org/image/upload/c_crop%2ch_883%2cw_1401%2c...
When I was 25 I started learning guitar, I'd play an hour a day consistently for about 4 years - at that point I was able to learn new songs by ear, noodle along to 80%~ of songs etc.
Guitar I've always found to be a super approachable instrument, particularly because online you can get a video demonstration for most songs. Compare to Piano which is pretty bias online towards sheet music and the ability to read that..
Tommy Emmanuel apparently learned by transrcibing, famously thinking that both the bass line and guitar lines he was hearing were a singular "guitar part". Just by having his expectations (incorrectly) raised, he rose to the occasion and played both parts.
I forget where I heard this story -- it's probably either rather famous, or buried in an interview somewhere.
The percussionist Trilok Gurtu has said the same thing about listening to many recordings as he was growing up. He just assumed that all the percussion was played by one person, all at once, and so he figured out ways to do it, even when it was 2 or even 3 people with overdubs.
Tommy drew a lot of inspiration from Chet Atkins who was really the pioneer of the bass+guitar "one hand band" style of playing. Tommy just improved on it a lot, adding more rhythmic elements, but to your point, yes, he was largely self-taught and driven to learn.
A good interview on his background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py4T1qv9bnQ
He tells it everywhere. (Also demonstrates the thumb vs fingers playing independently everywhere.)
A variation on this is to use one of the many helpful tools, such as The Amazing Slowdowner. Easily loop over snippets and do the hard work of listening/transcribing, but without faffing around trying to rewind just the right amount.
This piece of software has been my goto on transcribing music for all of the instruments I play for the past 25 years. I can't recommend it enough. It has been pivotal in me being a better musician. Works on Linux, Mac and Windows.
https://www.seventhstring.com/xscribe/overview.html
Same for me. It came recommended by my upright bass teacher. I used to transcribe all songs that way.
Recently, I've been lazy and learn new songs by watching players on YouTube.
Listening and transcribing is an excellent thing to do. But it would be terrible advice to say it's the only thing to do.
Also, I would argue that if you really want the benefit of transcribing, don't write it down until you have memorized whatever chunk you are transcribing - the act of memorizing it and learning it solely by ear is where the real value is.
On the other hand, this is not a good way to learn technique or the fretboard, as the easy keys will be vastly overrepresented, and you don't need to know where you are. That's a challenge that's almost unique to guitar and bass, and getting over that hump requires learning material by note name (whether from scores, tabs, or just chord symbols).
(my bonafides: 35 years playing, gig on sax, bass, piano, and percussion, currently doing an interdisciplinary PhD in music and CS, and running a jazz club night where I perform weekly)
"Keys" and "note names" literally only come up on the guitar when playing open strings. When playing fretted notes, the guitar is a completely relative instrument. You should focus on learning diatonic patterns of tones and semitones on the fretboard directly, not individual notes. It's a completely different method than the piano keyboard, which involves working within a fixed diatonic framework, and altering it to make "transposition" work. This meshes well with solfège and even more so with historical solmization, which are also highly relative methods (being intended originally for the voice).
I play electric and uptight jazz bass. While what you describe is possible for some genres, not knowing keys and the fretboard the same way you know keys on the piano is a non starter for jazz. All the competent jazz guitarists and bassists I know have this down cold. It's table stakes in my world.
> uptight jazz bass
mah man . . . too much of that loosey goosey stuff.
Lol I have to admit, I do play "uptight bass". The Freudian thumb slip got me, ha
Relaxing on that thing is hard! :)
RiP Eugene Wright - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qs1J612nZs
Curious to know more: Where are you doing your interdisciplinary PhD in music + CS?
Thanks
Hi, University of Victoria in Canada.
It's still tabs, but marginally better because you're making your own tabs. Work on hearing the key and chord progression and you won't need tabs. You'll be able to jam with anyone, anytime. It'll take a couple months to get there, but you'll no longer rely on tabs - which I think is the goal.
When you are transcribing a guitar part you have to think about the key, the chords, and how to play the part efficiently. It's a great way to get a better understanding of the neck since there is usually more than one way to play a part.
Had a lot of fun contributing tabs to Ultimate Guitar, esp. when folks would write notes of appreciation. The harder the better - not cheating to slow down the track to understand rapid lick in solos (the Steely Dan ones were a gas) either. You lose a little bit of the magic (little is off limits with some practice) but the fact that you can figure out your favorite tracks and imagine yourself up on stage is fun.
I learned this way myself without being told. I was gifted a nearly ruined classical guitar that my mom took to a music shop and a guy got into working condition for $20. I then listened to every record, cassette and CD in our house looking for any guitar I could hear, especially individual notes, and learned dozens of songs.
It is painstaking and tedious, but it works. I look back on that time, the first few years I played, and I am genuinely surprised at some of the difficult songs I worked through in this way.
But now, over 30 years later and still playing regularly, I almost never do a note-for-note transcription of other peoples playing. I tend to either just get the gist of the harmony and melody by listening and get into the general ballpark. I often use ultimate guitar or other tab sites just for an outline of the chords (or download sheets from real books for jazz).
But my aim is always to fully memorize a piece, from beginning to end, so I can play it without any reference. That, for me, is the goal. Any way I get there (tabs, sheets, ear, demonstration, etc.) works fine in my books.
You will improve what you practice, possibly. This is advice for learning to play by ear. I was given the exact opposite advice by my classical guitar teacher in college because I was playing one thing and hearing something else. Sometimes, practice makes you worse or is a waste of time at best. If I could give better advice, it would be to be brutally mindful of what you are playing. Record it, and hear what is there. If it isn’t painful, you probably aren’t practicing.
>When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down.
OP, you should have mentionned the prerequisite of absolute pitch...
No need for absolute pitch. All you need is relative pitch. You play a note, compare to the note you heard, maybe even play them at the same time. And then change the note till you find the right one.
How do you do that with chords? I know everyone who isn't completely tone deaf can do that with one single note. But when it comes to chords, unless you already know some music theory, aren't there infinite number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?
In some genres there are an infinite number. Most of the music regular people listen to is diatonic though and uses either power chords or triads, and then there are not that many options.
You don't have to get it right. If you know the basic guitar chords in the open positions, you can sort of play along to the vast majority of popular songs. As your hearing, knowledge of the neck, and maybe music theory improves you will start to recognise more things.
The point is not a perfect outcome. The point is the effort.
> infinite number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?
Kinda, but on Guitar, most pop songs are major/minor, possible sevenths. I think this post is aimed at someone who can read tab, but isn't "good" (what ever that means) so they should have an understanding of basic chord shapes.
The post does imply that this only really works if you can comfortably read tab, which is probably 6month-2 years of work (part time)
I thought the same for a long time and it really discouraged me. My natural pitch recognition is pretty bad. What helped was starting with very simple melodies and songs, so I could get familiar with the most common movements. That made it easier to figure out progressions, because I learned how to narrow down the options. I’m still not great at it, but I keep improving. That’s why I think it’s trainable.
All of it is good but none of it is a shortcut.
The greats who became so good doing this had massive amounts of time to do it and put in massive amounts of effort.
I started learning guitar using tabs. It's good for easily picking up a song, but I found it painful to learn new songs. Everything I played I simply memorized and learning a new song was always a start from scratch.
I mostly play classical guitar and now force myself to get better at sight reading standard music notation. I find it extremely hard but very rewarding because I'm now able to simply pick up a sheet of music and with a couple of tries figure out the basics of a piece. It opens up a whole library of beautiful pieces.
Same, I finally managed to stick with learning standard notation this year after several false starts and I’m kicking myself I didn’t start earlier. There were a few tough moments where it seemed like I’d never get (learning about key signatures, moving past 1st position) but now I’m starting to get comfortable playing up to the 7th position. It’s so nice being able to just buy a big book of Sor or Giuliani or Carcassi studies or even some Bach transcriptions and play them straight out of the book instead of needing to listen to a performance first and then look at the tab.
I'm working on becoming a better piano player and forcing myself to read sheet music. To your point, it's incredibly difficult. To the point that I'm 50/50 about whether I'll ever get good enough for it to matter. I'm learning songs, but in nearly every case I'm mostly memorizing the song. It's really frustrating.
I've been advised to use a keyboard to record my playing without being able to hear it and playing straight from the sheet music. I haven't tried it yet though.
Are you telling me that spending time writing an app to learn the guitar neck isn't the best way?? Blasphemy, I tell you!
Anyway here is my app of shame:
https://kelvie.github.io/chord-finder/
I also came to the realization after making this that my time was better spent transcribing, but I wanted to learn egui (and this was before coding agents, so it actually took some time).
There should be a saying like "A tool is not the task" similar to "A map is not the land." As professional tool makers it can be easy to replace the task with a tool in theory, but that's not reality.
In a similar vein I think that's why there are so many devs making game engines instead of games.
Perhaps you're looking for this?
https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...
Maybe? This seems to be more aimed at procrastination. Making map or a tool is still doing a thing, just not the thing.
57yo here who started guitar from scratch 16 months ago, with zero musical background. For my fellow players, I'm at the stage where barre chords are playable but switching between them quickly is still tough.
I studied exclusively with an app (Yousician) for the first 13 months, then got a local teacher I see once a week. I practice 45-60 minutes a day and have only missed a few days in the last 16 months.
In my experience, it all comes down to practice. There is no magic forumula or shortcut. The 2000 hours to passable playing is very much accurate. I track that chart nearly perfectly.
It's very much a sprint-plateau experience. This week I was trying to learn the chords in Clapton's "Old Love" and for 6 days I could not switch between them, then on the 7th day I was able to make the leap. There's a bunch of brain science about consolidating memories and such but...it all comes down to practice.
I agree with the sentiment that you have to practice correctly, but even if you learn bad habits, more practice and challenging yourself will weed them out. It's really crucial to always challenge yourself. Practice is doing hard things, not playing things you already know. You have to separate practice from playing, because they're two different things. Yes, there's a value in picking up the guitar and fooling around, but to really get better, you have to challenge yourself constantly.
Guitar is a game of millimeters, to an extent I never appreciated. This is where a local teacher can be hugely helpful. How you position your hand, where your thumb is, the arch in different knuckles, how much you're pressing down, how you are positioning that barring finger, where your right hand is, etc. - it's all extreme fine-tuning.
It's massively rewarding. But the learning curve is brutal. I practice for an hour at mid-day and would never have imagined the incredible health benefits in terms of stress relief. It's an hour (to borrow a Steely Dan quote, albeit not in its original drug context) "time out of mind" where I'm doing something completely orthogonal to the rest of my life, for no reason except to hone a skill and enjoy.
I HIGHLY recommend keeping a journal and noting every day what you did. Day by day you'll think "I'm not improving at all, I suck, maybe I'm getting worse"...then you look and realize how much progress you've made compared to two months ago, etc.
BTW, my daughter, 16, practices half as much as I do or less, yet learns 2-3x as fast because she has a long younger brain.
And because she does less things in her day? Letting the brain process the instrument playing during day and night, not a bunch of other stuff. I’m sure brain age matters a lot but I think it’s a bit overrated. Probably a lot to do with environment as well.
Old Love is such a good song.
It’s in the way that you use it, boy don’t you know.
This is equally true for game design
I'll often have a video game open. Play about 10-15 minutes, and then spend 1-2 hours practicing the knowledge gained.
It's inspiring
I've been playing guitar for 30+ years. When I was a kid, I learned almost everything by ear - note by note by note...
In hindsight, once I had learned a song, I had actually learned MUCH more than just that song. It is that "extra" that adds up over time and makes one a guitarist and not just someone who can play some songs on the guitar.
Rock on!
Personally prefer to search for guitar tabs of things I can barely play. And also sound terrible while playing them and tense my whole body while doing so. This is the point of playing the guitar, RIGHT?
Nope, the point is collecting as many guitars as possible. ;)
I wish this was a joke. :D :(
Obscure "learn it by ear" guitar story...
Upon hearing Eruption for the first time, the story goes that Tony MacAlpine learned to play the finger tapping section by PICKING IT because he didn't know finger tapping was a thing. Only after seeing Van Halen in concert did he realize what Eddie was doing.
If memory serves me right, I read this in either Guitar Player or Guitar World magazine back in the late 80s or early 90s. Whether Tony was embellishing or not is unknown.
Similarly, Ben Travers didn't have a delay pedal, so learned to pick the delayed parts on Pink Floyd's "Run like hell" when he was younger, since taken to ludicrous speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CY0_HG8J5M
Ben Travers playing is mental!! Thx for the track. Needed it today.
<3
That's fantastic! Pros find a way.
By the way Justin had a new video recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gse5EuM_HWU
"I Practiced Wrong for 40 Years?"
I learned to play guitar this way -- listening to CDs and scrubbing back and forth, writing down what I heard. It's great, but it only gets you so far. Learning pentatonic scales was a step-change for me.
as somebody who practices from tabs I have no idea how I would begin doing this.
Here is a suggestion...
First, figure out the bass line. That typically suggests the chord progression. If you know your chords, then, for simple songs, you have the rhythm figured out.
For solos, it's more tricky. If you aren't familiar with common soloing patterns (licks) and/or scales then start with simple solos and work your way up.
I am playing for quite a while... Had private lessons with a coach to practice solo guitar, and general understanding for a couple of years. Before that around 10 years or more as amateur, now it's been 3 years since I spoke to a guitar coach last time.
I play every day, I do my solos, I play blues, I don't need chords. But it's hard.
Just don't underestimate how hard it is - to be able to play any solo by ear. I guess I just don't have any freaking talent. Pretty obvious at this point, since some people do a better progress in 3-5 years of work.
But for me it's not. I realized that for me something isn't just clicking. There was no breakthrough moment I expected all these years.
I invested a lot into playing guitar, but... meh. Honestly, I wish I spent all that time learning AI math or just math in general. Or spend my time on something that would have a better ROI.
Looking back I see how much effort it took, and how low my ROI is. I wish I gave up earlier.
This is a great way of phrasing it -- ROI. My mom is a violin teacher and when I asked her if I could learn, she said "no, you don't have the hands for it". She recommended something like guitar would be better for me.
Not everyone can do everything, nor is everything a good return on investment. If you tell people they can do whatever they want, you are effectively wasting their time. Better to give them some useful advice, e.g. your fingers are better for the guitar, rather than insisting everyone can do everything.
Everyone can do much better than they think though.
My daughter's violin teacher refused to teach any adult because according to him if you're too old you're a lost cause ;) I agree an adult is likely not going to be the world's top violinist but I'm also sure that with enough work you can make vast improvements.
On both the guitar and on the violin you are not magically going to get to your max potential. It requires a lot of work. On the guitar you can get to a point where you can play simple songs relatively quickly. On the violin you do sound awful for much longer so it does require a lot more work to get to a reasonable level. Whether that's worth your time or not depends on you.
It is hard.
I can hear a tune and immediately sing it or whistle it. But I can't immediately play it on the guitar. It's much easier for children than adults.
It's also hard to force yourself to practice the relevant skills. You can play scales all day but that won't necessarily help your ear. What you need is to force your brain to make the connection.
I mean, it kind of sounds like you hated the whole process and didn't care about the result either. What was your reason for taking up the guitar as a hobby in the first place?
I suspect it's actually impossible to get reasonably good at something without some amount of passion for it, to some degree or another. Most musicians are in it for the thrill of learning something that most people find hard to do, or because they love music, or because they want to be part of a community that values music. Occasionally because they think they can make money at it.
I play an instrument or two, but only for fun. I love music, but I'm at a point in my life where I will never be good enough to be in a band. I have enough other hobbies anyway. I take a random 15 minutes out of my day to play a few songs, maybe practice a new song I'm learning, watch a short Youtube video about it here and there, and that's enough for me.
I can't imagine you can do it for many years without a passion. I'm saying that when it comes to playing an insrument, there is definitely a concept of a talent involved. If you're not talented, you ain't gonna reach stars even if you spend 10-15 years doing it with passion.
Loving musing doesn't mean you can play it.
You're getting dunked on a little bit in the replies, but your point of view is important for people to read. Not everyone is capable of learning every skill, and practice is necessary but insufficient. I've been on and off trying to learn a foreign language for decades, and it just doesn't click, no matter what I try (formal lessons, immersion, book study, apps). I used to have the "Just practice, bro" attitude, but I've done a 180 over the years and I have a lot of empathy and understanding now when my own kid complains "I just can't learn this."
It's also about how you practice. It's true that not everyone can get to any level at any skill. But it's also true we underestimate our abilities and potential almost universally. That said where you invest your limited time and what you enjoy and want to work on is totally up to you. But often "I can't do it" is just an excuse or a mindset or not having found the workaround or the right approach (where a teacher can sometimes help).
Why did you continue playing for over a decade?
I was always pretty curious about what's gonna happen next :) Like one year more into that - will it make me fundamentally better or not? If you understand fretboard - will it make you better or not? If you learn the scales, if you practice them, etc... I was (and still am) looking for something that would hopefully glue all of that together.
Don't get me wrong, I produced a couple of songs, some people say they're pretty good. But honestly, it's a crap.
I'm a new player so I'm not asking this to be snarky but to understand. How can you think you don't need chords? It seems to me, 5 months into my journey, that chords are a fundamental aspect of guitar. It sounds like someone taking up golf but saying they don't need putts. Can you help me understand?
this is pretty sad
How do I get started if I don't even know the notes yet though?
how to get better: https://berkleepress.com/music/guitar/page/2/
dissect Volume 1, 2 and 3 of A Modern Method for Guitar, no excuses, no cries
> When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down
How do you do that with chords? I know everyone who isn't completely tone deaf can do that with one single note. But when it comes to chords, unless you already know some music theory, aren't there huge number of combinations you have to try before you find the correct one?
Practice a lot. Try things you "can't play" and do them a lot. Pick it up every every single day.
There's some analogy around learning to play a song without using your ears and painting without using your eyes. Like the silliness on the drawing side is obvious. The benefits gained by using your ears to learn music (again this is such a silly statement when you think about it) are so huge and so overlooked by so many beginner guitar players. An hour of learning by ear is worth a week of reading. Also, as I see it, youtube is full of perpetual teachers looking for perpetual students; being a perpetual student sucks. All you need is records.
The most important ingredient is time. Just make sure you do something regularly. At the beginning you may just care about making anything that works and measures up to stuff you like, but the truest truth is that you can't start getting into a thing and expect your taste to remain the same.
As you learn more about the instrument you will learn more about what you like and it will eventually shift. There are people where this is not the case, but they are rare and they don't make better or worse music than others.
You may also start to notice more and more that the guitar playing was the simpler part in most music you like,the harder part was how it all came together as a band, how it was composed and recorded and mixed. Guitar players the world over try to compete with sounds that have run through microphones, mixing consoles, channel strips, mixed with other instruments and mastered. And some of them can't even hear where the guitar ends and where the bass guitar starts. So you have generations of guitar players chasing dragons and spending a ton of money on gear that gets them nowhere.
Gear isn't nearly as important as anybody makes it out to be, especially if you go your own way. And that is my recommendation: Go your own way. Sure copy others for learning, but develope your own sound, style of playing, your own music.
Learn to play by ear. Practice scales. Practice arpeggios. Learn open chords. Learn barre chords. Learn moveable shapes. Learn to move among chord shapes. Practice with a metronome. Find people to play with. Learn to read music. Learn to sight read. Do all of these things and you will be a musician.
Reminded me of that scene in “le peril jeune”, a french movie about kids growing up in the 70s
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1hnc5
Is there any quick test I can do to see if I can innately determine tones like this? If I fail said test, I can know that I'm not cut out for guitar.
There are a bunch of ear training quizzes online and I believe also YouTube videos.
I don't think this is a general requirement for learning the guitar. It's just one aspect. For most people whether you can hear that something is a 3rd or a 5th shouldn't impact their ability to play songs and have fun on the guitar. A sense of rhythm is maybe more important. If you can whistle a tune or sing along anywhere close to a song you're probably ok.
Good advice.
I’m a banjo player. Starting with tab ( and playing for myself ) quickly got me to a certain level and then ingrained some bad habits. Playing by ear is much better.
One way that seems to work really well:
1. Listen to the song, tap the rhythm to learn it.
2. Figure the chord progression.
3. Using standard rolls ( sequence of notes, one measure ) find how to fit in melody notes
The Way I Learn Now: Listening & Transcribing
I lived near a music school and took proper guitar lessons. After getting down the basics from the Alfred Method book, this was the homework my guitar teacher gave me.
Coincidentally enough, I was also transcribing RATM back then too...
> When you hear the first guitar note, stop the song, find the note on the guitar, and write it down
I think the problem for me is I’m so tone deaf I can’t tell which note is the right note.
TLDR: practice. If you have sufficient natural talent xor will, you will eventually go past the canon of available material and begin to transcribe your own. Then there are those who move to creation, either immediately or somewhere in the path.