Hello, I'm John from Venezuela and these are my goals

My plan to be where I want to be (in musical terms)

Hi everyone, I’m John from Venezuela. I’ve been in the forum for a while now, but never presented myself properly.

I’m 24 years old and I’ve been playing guitar since I was 15. At 16 I started to study classical guitar at a local conservatory and taking private lessons, after 2 years of practice I was playing at recitals and the local TV. Also I tried to record a disc with another 3 classical guitarists. The disc was a total failure, but learned a lot.

Months ago I lost my guitar teacher, he was murdered here (My country is a cruel place right now), and just the fact of being able to play a guitar with all the strings is a miracle.

Since my teacher died I stopped playing guitar for at least six months until I felt like playing again months ago after watching a lot of Cracking the Code videos. I felt a real interest on discovering the mysteries of the pick. I played mandolin before, so, I already had a firm grasp on how to pick, though I never thought methodically about it.

My goals are pretty clear right now:

  • Keep improving my finger-style classical technique
  • Adopt 1 or more picking styles
  • Learn many Jazz Standards
  • Learn to create Chord-Melody compositions
  • Acquire a broad Jazz guitar vocabulary to improvise
  • Deep dive into ear training
  • Ingrain the basics of Musical Theory
  • Adopt many classical-guitar studies to play them with flat-picking
  • Learn the fret-board in a systematic way
  • Create healthy habits when it comes to practicing in order to get the most out of my time with the guitar

Thanks for reading this far and thanks to the CtC team for all the good stuff!

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Welcome to the forum, John!

Hey John, welcome and thanks for sharing. So sorry to hear about your guitar teacher, that must have been really hard. I really hope things improve, with all the awful stuff happening in the world right now.

Glad you’re back to playing guitar, and glad you found our videos. This looks like a great list of goals, and I think you’ll find a lot of good conversations here on the forum, on many of these topics. Let us know if there’s anything we may be able to help with!