The quickest way to get to your playing goals in guitar lessons is to tell your music teacher which songs you want to learn. And nowadays we carry infinite music jukeboxes everywhere with us in the form of smartphones. However, there's one downside - the wonders of online instant access to an infinite and ever changing variety of music through Spotify, Apple Music, Sirius, YouTube, and other streaming platforms with intelligent algorithms curating our music playlists for us every day make it trickier for students to nail down the songs they want to learn in lessons. The phrase I'm looking for here is "analysis paralysis" - there's just too many choices sometimes to narrow it down!
You might hear a song you like on a streaming platform or even your own playlist and instinctively make a mental note of it, but I've got a better trick for you to help set clearer goals for yourself in this regard: make a "Songs I Want To Learn On Guitar" playlist!
In other words, instead of making things more confusing with a general listening playlist, make a dedicated, focused playlist for the sole purpose of acting as a record-keeping device for lessons and personal goal-setting. You could even make several playlists, like "Awesome country songs I want to learn", or "Epic guitar solos I want to learn", or "Cool intro licks" - use your imagination and create your own categories! That way, whenever your guitar teacher asks you what songs you'd like to learn, you can read them off to your teacher or just hand them your phone. Some suggestions on how to approach this:
•If you have some songs in mind already, great - add them to the list(s). However, I also suggest just listening to your music or playlists as usual, and when a particularly inspiring song, lick, solo, or riff comes up in a song, add that song to the playlist. Just keep repeating this over the natural course of time and you'll eventually have a robust list of choices.
•Don't overthink the difficulty level thing and don't censor your choices - sure, there are obviously some songs that you'll know are definitely over your head (I wouldn't start with an Eddie Van Halen solo), but the idea here is that this is your fantasy "daydream" playlist. Go ahead and add what inspires you regardless of difficulty level. There are many songs that sound difficult but are actually surprisingly easy to play, and some songs that sound deceptively easy but end up being very technically difficult! In any case, trust your guitar teacher to filter through these for you. They'll veto or put off for later the songs they know are way over your playing level and which ones would be a great project or learning tool right away.
•If there are any particular riffs, licks or sections of songs you want to learn, make a note if you can of the minutes and seconds in the song that part is at. This way, your teacher can hit the ground running in the lesson to bee-line you sooner to your goals.
•What you want to learn to play on guitar, and the music you like to have in the background can sometimes be different things. So start a music streaming app out with songs of guitar players you like in styles you want to play and see where the algorithm takes you. Down-vote styles and songs you don't want to play and up-vote the ones you do so the algorithm can eventually narrow things down more for you.
As a guitar teacher, I love it when students come in with playlists like this. I can scroll through it and eventually say "this one would be great to learn!", and it's a guaranteed hit because the student already gave it their personal approval!
Tyson Farmer
www.lessonface.com/TysonFarmer
