Guitar Goals

Establishing Guitar Playing Goals

First off, why goals?

Goals are what measure our progress. We all go through the time when we measure our guitar playing on how impressed people are with it. But hopefully we move beyond that and realize that the more important measure of our musicianship is how well we express ourselves through our relationship with the music and rhythms we develop in life.

Goals are concrete (theoretically)
Goals tell us what we need to work on
Goals give us a temporary end in site
Goals relieve frustration and disorganization
Goals reveals to us our successes most importantly

Start out with observations about your current playing and your current attitude and write them down. You can use paper and pencil, type them up or whatever. I personally live by my journal. I keep all of my notes, goals and objectives in it. I spend a lot of time logging my guitar practices and keeping tabs on what material I've been covering in my practice sessions. Beyond that I use it for just about everything else too. I love it. But for guitar purposes it really suits me to log and journal on the computer. Plus it gives me a lot of other features that help with personal life and guitar playing. Anyway...

We all have guitar heroes. We all want to play better and learn more. We all seem to find ourselves in a rut every now and then. So ... what do we do? Well, I used to just get frustrated, irritated and I hated everything and everyone after “practicing” for an hour or two and feeling like I accomplished nothing. I realized that I was just simply noodling around on the guitar and not really practicing anything. At least anything that I didn’t already know how to play. Don’t continually practice stuff you know how to play. Not only that, I wasn’t even focusing at all.

I started making some general statements about where I wanted to be with the guitar. Here’s what I knew I wanted.

“I want to play like Alex Degrassi.”
“I want to solo like Phil Keaggy.”
“I want have the same feeling in my songs as Nightnoise.”
“I want to be able to hit notes like Pierre Bensusan.”
“I want to jam out like Tommy Emmanuel.”

But that didn’t tell me anything. So I figured I need to ask myself some questions.
You have to ask the right questions before you can make progress.
These are the things I wanted to be able to do. So I ask myself and recorded these in my journal,

What is it that these guys do that I’d like in my style?
What are the techniques that I can incorporate into my practice that will enhance my playing like the guys I want to play like?”
NOT why can I not play that?
NOT why is this guy a guitar genius and why am I Pheobe from Friends?
Now I needed to make some detailed observations. Take a look at the next section to see what I noticed about each of the musicians.

Go back to the "Chord Course"
Go on to "Narrowing Goals"

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Establishing Guitar Playing Goals

First off, why goals?