Originally Posted by: john of MTSlippin Lizard -- Got any references/url's for that octave system?

John, in the first post I made the name of the book a link to the url for Amazon... the book covers the octave thing right at the start, so I'd recommend it highly. I was trying to be clever... :o

I haven't taught guitar professionally, but I have taught other subjects. While I know we're all trying to help, some of the advice, like "learn theory" prompts the instructor inside me to point out that there is no magical "learn-guitar-and-be-happy" panacea.

I recently read an excellent article in the Guardian about TED Talks, and how they have now basically established the format of "speaker goes through a personal experience, has epiphany, discovers solution to all our problems". What the article was getting at was that often the problems that are discussed have no neat-and-tidy solutions, but actually require a lot of thought and potentially multiple courses of action.

Sometimes I feel like guitar is the same way. When people say they are in a rut, its really important to answer the questions that Maggior posed, and for us to observe those answers before giving a lot of advice. Sometimes when you're stuck in a rut its not because you're not reaching your goals but because you haven't really set or defined any goals at all. You might just be learning random bits of songs, or the odd lick here or there... a scale that you learn, but then never use. All that happened to me when I first started with guitar, and continued for a long time until I started really defining why I was picking up the guitar in the first place. It doesn't have to be anything monumental... even just setting a simple goal, plan, & course of action like "I'd like to learn acoustic fingerpicking (goal). I will go through Lisa's lessons (plan). I am working on Lisa's lessons and will keep going until I learn the theme song (course of action)." As long as your goal is sincere to your own wishes, and well defined, you should be happy with the result. Goals change of course, and need redefining as we improve and our interests change, but will still need them.