There are lots of guides on finding a good guitar teacher on the Internet. There are even lots of guides on how to practice guitar, and play guitar. A lot of emphasis is put on how to teach or how to practice something or play something specifically.

 

There aren’t so many guides out there on how to be a great student of learning guitar. It doesn’t matter where you learn guitar from, whether you are learning from a guitar teacher, or DVDs, books or the internet: there are good students and there are bad students.

 

On a side note, I personally believe it is extremely important to get guidance from a guitar teacher. All kinds of problems can occur being a self-taught guitar player, but that is another topic for another day.

 

In this article, I want to outline a few different types of students. You should be able to identify which you need to be in order to reap the maximum benefit from investing your time and effort into the world of guitar playing.

 

 

The Variety Seeker
 

These are people who just like to learn a bunch of different bits and pieces, parts of songs here and there, never really learning anything in its entirety. One week they are excited about learning sweep picking, and the next week they have a new-found love for blues phrasing. The next week, they want to take a stab at hybrid-picking, then try their hand at 2-hand tapping.

 

Wanting to learn all of those things is absolutely fine. However, you can’t be spread out in all directions and getting distracted and changing what you want to do all the time. You can’t just be learning new things all the time. You need to stay focused on things that lead you closer to your desired guitar playing skill level. If your goal is to learn different styles/genres that involve different skill sets, that is ok too – just make sure you are not hopping from one thing to the next.

 

The Dazed and Confused
 

Do you live in a disarray of crushed sheets of un-categorized, un-labeled lesson material, torn pages, post-it notes, or even have to sort through random files on your computer? Agreed, musicians are not stereotyped for being the most organized people on the planet. However, unorganized guitar students have a hard time to even begin a practice session due to the chaos that always ensues.

If you are not organized, you’re probably wasting valuable time during your precious practice sessions trying to find the right material. You may also tend to get confused or even worse – get too overwhelmed to start practicing!

 

The Lukewarm-ers
 

Have you ever met someone without passion for what they are doing? I have met many. Sometimes, I meet someone with a seemingly cool job and say, “Wow, that sounds really interesting!”, to which they respond, “Yeah, its alright..” in a dull, uninspired tone. Clearly there is a lack of passion there.

 

Can you imagine your favourite musician having lack of passion for music?

 

To me, guitar is the coolest freaking instrument on this planet and I have a blast every single time I pick it up. When I’m not playing the guitar, I certainly am dreaming about it. How about you?

 

 

The Watchers
 

Video platforms are really cool additional supplemental resources for aspiring guitar players. Unfortunately, as a budding guitarist or musician, it is difficult to discern between good and bad teachers, relevant and irrelevant lessons, shiny objects and pertinent matters, sound vs. questionable guitar playing philosophies, etc.

I’m not saying its all bad, if you want to watch videos online, it is ok – just make sure that it is relevant to what you want to do.
 

Point here is, don’t do more watching, when you should be practicing. Don’t JUST be a watcher, and nothing else. If you don’t pick up your guitar to practice at some point, and just let auto-play run, you could end up on a different planet without realizing.

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