How do you focus? Utilizing Guitar Tricks is a good first stop, but you have to organize your learning so that it's all tied together in one package that includes your eyes, your ears, your fingers and your brain.
EYES—Learn to read standard notation. Tab is fine, but it doesn't show you the phrasing and the underlying harmonic relationships between notes, which will give your creativity an edge. Several good learn-to-read books with accompanying CDs are available at Amazon. If you go with the program, you should be fairly adept at reading single lines from fake books within six months. Integrating those lines with the overlying chord symbols will start you on your way to improvisation.
EARS—Music is all about what we hear. Right? How does one learn to play by ear? First, make up a list of simple songs such as Old MacDonald Had a Farm or Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall, and flesh out their notes on your own without resorting to any type of notational crib sheet. Play them vanilla-style (single line). Then play them over their chords and try to throw in peddle notes and banjo rolls from the chordal harmonies. When that starts to sound plain-Jane to you, add in some passing chromatic notes in the off beats. Slide up from a half note below or down from a full note above the harmonic target note, which will occur on the down or the up beat. If this sounds Band-in-the-Box formulaic, it is, but it will open up harmonic possibilities to you. As your rhythmic sense gets more sophisticated, you can jump the beat (syncopate), and swing the phrasing from the up to down beats. Before moving on to more complex melodies, practice the easy stuff in different keys and in different positions on the neck. Learn to arpeggiate into a target note as well as hit it from an ascending or a descending scale. On those pregnant half notes that occur at the ends of the fourth and eighth bars, learn to throw in fills based on the previous few notes you played. Try to make them voice lead into the second verse or the refrain.
FINGERS—Practice your scales and especially your arpeggios, but don't go overboard. If you practice scales for five hours a day, you'll be great at it, but that's all you'll be great at. Learn to play solo instrumentals. After you learn to read music, I would suggest that you take a crack at The Complete Works of Fernando Sor. His studies are very musical and will teach you a lot about harmonic structure as well as give your fingers a workout. Other good books to stretch your technique include guitar methods by fellow old masters Matteo Carcassi and Mauro Giuliani. If you can get half way through any of those books, reading a fake book piece at first sight will be a walk in the park. Be that as it may, you've got to give some to get some. Practice!
BRAIN—Some students excel at sight reading, but have no idea of what they are playing. A former music teacher of mine used to call them transcriptionists. If he thought that I was getting too cozy with the notation, he would pull the book away and tell me to fake it. Once I understood the underlying chord changes, I could BS my way through almost any piece. That's because I understood musical theory and knew my circle of fifths as well as such sundry facts that diminishing a chord would provide a nice lead in to the dominant fifth chord or that augmenting a chord would smooth the way to a subdominant fourth or take me from the dominant chord back to the tonic chord. I don't think about that kind of stuff anymore. It just happens.
So there you have it. Some artists play just three cowboy chords and they sell millions of records. Most virtuosos you may never ever heard of. Check out Julian Bream, John Williams, Sharon Isbin or that newest upstart, Ana Vidovic on You Tube. Are you still sure you want to be a virtuoso?
