My Experiments with The Guitar

This summer, I am learning the guitar. Or rather, re-learning it, because back in 2017, I was also learning the guitar. But on second thoughts, I wasn’t really learning it. Rather, I was repeatedly playing a few beginner songs — think Let it Be, American Pie, and Leaving on a Jetplane — that had (falsely) made me feel as if I was a guitarist.

This summer, things are different.

Every day, irrespective of whether the sun comes out or not, I play the guitar and practice it — two fundamentally distinct things. For ‘playing’ entails practicing one song over and over again. But ‘practicing’ entails sequentially fingerpicking chords, repeatedly practicing switchovers, and bruising one’s fingertips and dorsal sides of the index finger.

I have picked up a few key insights in the process.

One, ‘deliberate practice’ trumps practice. As I mentioned in my previous posts, I resonate with ‘deliberate practice’, the intent of improving at a specific sub-skill of a super-skill. In my case, I have divided the skill of “playing the guitar” into sub-skills like mastering bar chords, practicing switchovers, and getting clean sounds, all of which add up to the super-skill of playing the guitar. In contrast, earlier, I was playing the guitar at random, without the intent of improving at a particular segment.