4 Signs that You Might Be a Bad Guitar Player (and Solutions!)

1. Looking to become the next Yngwie Malmsteen right away. Ok, so you’ve been worshipping all these great guitarists since so long. Now that you have a guitar, you can do what you’ve always wanted to do: play just like them! However the fact of the matter is that if you overreach, you are almost guaranteed to crash and burn! The reason for this is that it is important to start off steadily, and start with the basics. Like any structure or a building, the foundation is the most important thing!  When you pick up the guitar, you need to lay a strong foundation before moving on to the advanced stuff which might be too high for your level. For a beginner to be paying the solo from ‘Fear of the Dark’, not a good idea.

2. After listening to all those musicians kill it with their guitars on stage, now you have the chance to do it yourself! Lack of patience obviously comes with the package, like trying to play advanced pieces of music note-for-note at the recorded tempo, instead of slowing them down to make them more easily playable by beginners or intermediate players. Needless to say, this is a big mistake to make. And trust me when I say this, you will make a tremendous amount of errors if you take this route. It might even result in you going on to become an error-prone guitar player. The solution is to slow down or simplify the advanced pieces of music, and practice as much as you can that way, making sure that you commit as less errors as possible.

3. Doing the above will not only make you a sloppy guitar-player, your sloppiness and the fact that you’ve become error prone will lead to an increased amount of frustration. Frustration is easily one of the worst things that could happen to a guitar player, for two reason: (1) your frustration will most certainly cause you to become even more error-prone and sloppier, and (2) frustration is THE biggest reason why most guitar player pack up shop and quit. If you’ve reached a point where you’ve become frustrated with your guitar playing exploits, maybe it’s time to start afresh. Quitting is for quitters, you still have a shot at this. Start from scratch, take it one step at a time and enjoy the process of learning how to play the guitar the right way.

4. Admitting that you have problems is the first step towards correcting yourself. However most frustrated guitar players fail to do this; they simply do not want to admit that they have problems which need to be fixed, instead coming up with ridiculous reasons why being sloppy is okay. Knowing or admitting that you have a problem is the first step towards correcting it. Being arrogant about it won’t do you any good. Instead, be more humble about it – admit that you’re doing this wrong, your approach is wrong and continuing like this will get you nowhere as a musician. Remember that Slash didn’t become Slash as soon as he picked up the guitar. It took him years before he became the musical phenom that he is today!

Now that you've admitted that you might be a terrible guitar player, why not do something about it?  You could take a guitar course like Guitar Tricks or JamPlay for example which teach you how to play guitar for a small monthly fee.  Of course, you maybe worried about what kind of value you would get from guitar lessons such as these.  But read any JamPlay review or Guitar Tricks review and you will be able to determine which of these courses will help you grow into a better guitar player.