Well... it was going so well

Playing Technique
#21

I think so many people suggest this because Troy always suggests it. His reasoning, as I understood it, is that we tend to not accurately express or understand our shortcomings.This means that others, including Troy himself, cannot solve the issue without seeing exactly what’s going on.

I know I thought I had a specific issue. Troy was kind about it, but he was probably getting tired of all the back and forth with me (via forum post) and suggested I post a video. That opened up an entirely different can of worms that set me on a good path.

If you want moral support, we’re here for you and don’t mind passing back and forth ideas and sharing similar feelings of frustrations. If you want to get your problem solved, I’d highly suggest posting a video (unlisted, as suggested earlier) and tagging Troy for a critique. If anyone else posts replies/suggestions and you think they’re only worth a grain of salt, then bear with those until Troy critiques you :slight_smile: We’re definitely all pulling for you and would love to see you get this fixed once and for all!

2 Likes
#22

Dude, come on. What’s with the attitude?
You are not leaving anyone with much to go on if you are not going to at least follow suggestions.
You state that specific licks are not working. A video is a diagnostic tool that will possibly help others on this forum see what you are not seeing.

There are at least a couple of times where you have stated that you haven’t rested up. You could do that and the problem might right itself.

Given the above, my analogy is that of going to the emergency room saying that you think that you arm may be broken, but won’t get an x-ray (video). You find a doctor that thinks they might know the problem, but you won’t take the medicine (rest).

You could always make an unnamed secondary YT account for this forum.

3 Likes
#23

I go through waves, when we’re not busy editing something - which we have been pretty swamped for the last month or so, so I haven’t been on here as much. But in the moments of downtime you will find lots of stuff from me. Also on older threads where I already know the context, like the one from @JakeEstner about arpeggio playing lately.

In generally though @joebegly has it exactly right. I’ll be honest, long wordy threads are a pet peeve of mine, because they don’t really tell me anything. I need to see video to know what’s going on and if I can’t then I am basically useless. Because what someone thinks their problem is may in reality have very little bearing on what the problem actually is. And also, very often I find myself typing that I think the clips look and sound great and don’t display much problem at all.

As a more general note, although I always contribute when I can, @tommo is the point person on the forum on our side for technique critiques. He is now an official member of our team and is also writing and filming upcoming lessons for us which are more content-driven. We have a lot of motor learning stuff, but less in the way of cool songs to play while you’re learning, and he’s putting together some good-sounding-yet-attainable pieces of music we can teach.

Just in case anyone is concerned, Tommo has all the chops in the world:

…and very detailed knowledge of all our conceptual stuff, to the extent that it is necessary. So there’s not much I’m going to see that he won’t see. But the more eyes the better, which I will suggest is the main value of the forum. Both @joebegly and @Johannes have done excellent work lately on technique critique posts. And not to short-change any of the other great commenters here.

Finally, we’re working on incorporating TC (technique critique) more formally into the platform itself. Right now it’s a bit of a hodge-podge trying to find and respond to all these threads on the forum. In the future, we’ll have a way to upload videos directly to a kind of user homepage, manage comments, control privacy settings, and so on. Guaranteed feedback from us will probably be part of a subscription, but we’re trying not to dilute what we already have here on the forum, just make it easier to use and more organized. This will take months to hammer this out but we’d like to have this functioning by the end of the year at least.

4 Likes
#24

This is exciting!

This should be common knowledge by now :slight_smile: Cool clip though! Rock on, @tommo!

2 Likes
#25

During your guitar playing journey you will have good days and bad days just like anything else. Feelings of regression and not uncommon and when it happens to me I realize that whatever technique that I felt I had regressed was because it was not yet “burned in completely” or practiced until second nature into my overall technique.The best part is you know without a doubt that the ability is within you and you just need to find it again. Just keep doing what you did to get there in the first place and it will all come back to you stronger. Fight the negative thoughts and other crap put your head down and go find it !!!

#26

Started to play my guitar again about a week ago after 2 monthes pause. Some techinques just disappeared, some are improved (even those which I didn’t practice)… Funny experince that showed me which techniques are really ingrained in my hands (brain… whatever).

Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with taking a rest from your guitar.

As for me, I sometimes like to compare guitar playing to bodybuilding. I think that when we practice we go through peaks and valleys. So, it’s not like I nailed some technique and then it disappeared. More like, I went beyond my current abilities and then returned to a stable level. And, of course, overtrainig leads to regress, whether it’s sport or any other kind of activity.