Learning the Guitar – Make Life Easier for Yourself

It’s not that easy to pick up a new skill – any new skill, for that matter. And it seems, the older I get, the less willing my brain and my body are to learn anything new. So when I do achieve something new, I’m dead pleased with myself!

For example, I’m qualified to teach Aerobics; Exercise to Music as it’s often called in the UK. Not unlike line dancing, it involves the class going through a routine of various moves that the instructor calls out. All done to music with a steady beat. The instructor has to be able to count the moves, be on the correct beat, be ready to cue the next move at exactly the right moment and also do the moves herself facing the class. Which means she has to go the opposite way and be on the opposite foot to the class. So she calls a grapevine to the right, points to her left and herself grapevines to the left.

Now most instructors take to this like a duck to water. But not me. In theory I could do it all perfectly. But in practice? Absolute shambles! Wrong way, on the wrong foot and off the beat. Gave up in disgust. My class got most of their exercise from laughing at me! (In the nicest possible way).

There’s a point to this sorry tale. If I had found myself a good instructor to teach me the moves from scratch before I ever attempted to get qualified, I would have found it all so much easier. And it was the same with my earlier attempts to play the acoustic guitar – the instruction book I chose to teach myself with was way, way too complicated and I made my life hard. With Jamorama, you start with the absolute basics and it assumes you don’t know one end of a guitar from the other. Which is what most beginners need. Why make my mistake and pretend, for the sake of your ego, that you know more than you do?

Life is tough enough already. Choose the easy option.

Take the advice of the Jedi master to the novice on his first visit to a Chinese restaurant….Use the Forks, Luke.

All the best,

Carol

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