How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?
North on Seventh Avenue and Hang a Right on West 57th
Wait. That’s not the way that goes. So how do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice.
I bought a guitar two years ago, almost to the day. And what have I done every day since? Practice, practice, practice. About two hours a day. That comes up to almost 1,500 hours. So I should have that pretty much mastered now, right?
Turns out, not so much. There is a popular theory out there, with roots in American Scientist magazine from 40 years ago, that it takes 10,000 hours to master something.
Ten thousand hours!?!
Fortunately, that is not entirely accurate. It can take less time than that to master the guitar. But, of course, it could take more. A lot more.
I’ve seen other charts that put my measly 1,500 hours at barely scratching the intermediate stage. Which is a good thing because I don’t consider myself intermediate yet. Maybe advance beginner, whatever the hell that means.
When I first began, I had this idea of where I would be at specific intervals in the future. I am now approaching where I thought I would be after six months.
I stopped by a guitar store to try out my next guitar the other day. (You never have enough.) The guy helping me, who looked about 12, said, “You’ve been playing a couple of years?” I still haven’t figured out if it was a good thing or a bad thing that he could pinpoint it like that.
So, how long will it take to, if not master, git gud, as the gaming world likes to say?
I’m glad you asked.
There are two answers to every question you could ever ask about learning to play the guitar.
- It depends
- More practice
That’s it. And most of the questions I have seen asked on forums and online groups can be answered by number two. But nobody wants to hear that. They want the easy button.
If you buy this guitar brand, put that pedal on it with these strings, and use drop D tuning…. Nope. More practice.
And if you are asking some of the questions like many I have seen, a lot more practice.
It’s incredible to me how many posts I have seen that begins along the lines of, “I’ve been playing for two weeks, and I still can’t… whatever.”
After two weeks, you should pretty much have mastered taking the guitar out of the case and putting it on your lap.
Okay, so it’s going to take more practice. How much more?
It depends.
Practice what? What do you call the practice?
If you have been learning the opening riffs to every rock song ever written, so you sound cool at the guitar store, that’s not practice.
In the highly esoteric parlance of advanced musical theory, that’s called screwing around.
Practice means to focus and intention. Going down a road with a specific goal in mind, knowing what steps are required to meet that goal, and methodically taking those steps.
Ahh, that’s where I went wrong.
You see, the problem is that playing the guitar means about a hundred different things. Different genres, styles, methods, and disciplines. And I’d like to master about 97 of them. And so, I frequently changed directions. That didn’t work.
So, one by one, I dropped the lessons, put away the videos, and placed the books back on the shelf.
Except for one of each. One lesson, one song, and one book.
I also rebooted my practice and took most things back to day one. Or at least month one. I didn’t need to read again about how to hold the guitar or the names of the strings. But I did need to get back down to basics. And slow down.
If I were to give one more piece of advice beyond more practice, it would be slow down. No, slower than that. How slow?
It depends. Slow enough that you can’t make a mistake. See, there’s this saying going around the guitar forums. Don’t practice until you don’t make a mistake. Practice until you can’t make a mistake.
So, I’m saying start so slow that you can’t make a mistake. And play at that speed until that piece becomes second nature. And by piece, I mean one or two bars, not the whole song. Until it is embedded into your muscle memory. And then, speed up. Just a little. No more than five BPM, but three might be better. Then, rinse and repeat until you have the song up to speed. How long will that take? You already know the answer to that.
But here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how long it takes because it’s the journey that counts. You will never be done. There’s always the next thing. You don’t stop learning, and you don’t stop practicing. So, don’t get in a hurry to get through this one thing. There are a thousand more things after this. And each one of those thousand will be easier if you spend more time on this one thing. One note on one string.
I’m going to be visiting New York in a few months, and I plan on going to Carnegie Hall. I might even take my guitar. Sit on a bucket out front and play a tune. At Carnegie Hall. After all, I already know how to get there.
