Practice

My instructor is Anders. I am really enjoying the lessons but there are no specific instructions on what or how to practice so I just move on to the next tutorial when I finish one. Does anyone know if this is the right way to do the course?

Hey marketkin,

My thought is to work on the exercises in you current lesson until you're pretty comfortable then move on.

Have fun,

Rumble

My rule of thumb...  when you can consistently play the lesson at speed without error three times in a row then move on. 

That said, there are some lessons that just take forever to master.  It's fine to move on but those should be added/revisited during your practice sessions with newer stuff.  IMO.

Good luck, have fun.

I basically looked at it as the lessons are what I should practice until I felt I could move on.   

If I found myself getting too frustrated with a particular chord or lesson then I moved on and came back to it later.  Anders also gives the impression that you should just always have fun with it and not have a rigid practice regime, just work on what areas you feel you personally need and experiment with what you have learned already and have fun!

I found some lessons were tougher than others and took longer to understand, the two finger power chords for instance took me weeks before I could move them up and down the fret board, so I just kept coming back to the lesson, focused on it for 5 minutes a day for several weeks while I carried on learning other lessons and it just clicked one day. 


Good luck :)

If you're building a rocket, there are certain steps you must take or the rocket may go BOOM! No one has accused guitar players of being rocket scientists (see what I did there  😎  ). So, the silly point is; there is really no perfectly right way to progress. That's also the good news.

If you try to perfect every aspect of a lesson, you'll never progress. I've mentioned in a few threads larely that even though I've been playing since 1981, been in bands and have a good amount of skill, I still really don't have a good open C chord. It's ok and no one will know the difference but it ain't great if I'm being objective.

Had I needed to perfect the open C and let that stop me, I woulda gotten nowhere.

Any lesson you learn, get it down solid enough where you feel mostly comfortable. Not perfect but comfortable. That's not to say you won't go back to some lesson to practice things. You should and you will. Unless the part of the lesson you're learning requires you perfect something, get things down solid and move on, return back to that lesson and brush and keep progressing.

We all have things, no matter how long we play, that will not be perfect. It's guitar and not that rocket science thing. The idea is to have fun and get better at the same time. Don't make it drudgery because of one part. Build and enjoy. Improve the weaknesses as best you can but don't let them stop you.

So, when to progress? Really, that thing you first asked. When it feels right. No one is testing you on it.

Lots of good advice here. 

In my opinion, it is often a little more fun to keep moving ahead in a lesson-sequence, as long as you spend adequate time with each segment, and are relatively comfortable with it. Even if each segment is not PERFECTED, you can keep moving ahead, to keep things fun and interesting.

AND - (this is important!) - any skill that seems to not be clicking-in the way you'd like it to, should go on your "works-in-progress" list. 

When you sit down for some guitar-time, make sure and dedicate some of your practice-time to one or more items on your "works-in-progress" list, so the skiills that need more focussed study don't fall off your radar. 

This means you have identified, and articulated, a particular skill that is lagging behind, even as you get better at playing the overall song or the lesson material. 

For instance, "when I play along with this lesson, I'm pretty much able to keep up - but I always seem to fumble around the chord change from D to B7."

So, you make a mini-drill out of that particular chord-change, and work JUST THAT for several very focussed minutes. 
That will help bring all the skills in the lesson sequence up to a par-level with one another. 

Hope this helps a little!

- Lisa