Busy watching the GT Musical Knights

Hi,

Joined GT nearly a year ago and spent several months focused on their introductory classes. Then dropped away to focus on the piano and some other life distractions that were raging away through the first part of this year. But I'm back again. I've been "tinkering" with music for several years now and began to discover that I was really just "learning-to-be-learning" and meanwhile buying a lot of gear I probably don't need, yet never making any real musical progress -- alas I've make the same mistake in the past in other areas of interest and I suspect that I'm not alone in this regard. So this time I've set some specific somewhat lofty (for me) musical goals for myself that also have deadlines. So in a few months I'll find out if the strategy delivers results or not.

Don

Hey MusicalPage, welcome back to GT.

Sounds familiar! I have a ton of other interests / passions. Guitar has been a life-long mountain to climb, and I take long breaks away from it (but it's always there in my mind). I spend intense, focused periods on learning and developing new skills, then move on to another subject for a while before coming back. Luckily a lot of it gets integrated (guitar, composition, orchestration, scoring, screenwriting, cinematography, video editing, animation, graphic design, marketing). That's just to say, yeah, changing subject happens, and I can sometimes feel like I'm all over the place. I often worry I am not truly mastering any one topic. But it also works out so far in the long-term.

Your experience with piano can actually be really useful to your guitar playing and vice versa. Piano is sort of the "master key" of all the instruments. So you probably didn't waste any time there.

ANYWAY, feel free to post your personal guitar goals / deadlines here because it could be inspiring to others. Having clear goals is super important! I'd be interested to see.

But also never forget to simply enjoy each moment / day of playing guitar. :)

-Carl.

Goals and commitment towards them will get you where you want to be Don.

19 mos in myself, started at 55. Learning guitar actually taught me enough piano that I can incorporate it into my recordings.

Best of luck

So I've set two guitar goals (one electric and one acoustic) and one piano goal. All three are due sometime in October of this year. The electric guitar goal is to be able to play the Led Zeppelin tune "You Shook Me" by following the GuitarTricks lessons taught by Tom Finch. Reasons for this tune are blues, familiar, slow and uses a slide which I'd love to learn more about. For the acoustic guitar I picked Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" as taught on here by Dave Celentano. The reasons are similar, the tune is very familiar and reasonably slow and it also uses a 12 string which I have and would like to use more. I have not picked a specific tune for piano yet, but do know it will be one of Josh Cohen's Radio Head adaptations that he has created and now published, you can listen to Josh’s music here on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5kPwwKXVuF49grCSzBUR7Q. The piano goal will likely be the most difficult largely because I will be on my own with no instruction. So when is GuitarTricks going to create PianoTricks?

[br]I am retired with relatively few demands on my time, so I can focus quite a bit of effort on the learning tasks. Along with learning more about these instruments and the songs I'll also be focusing on memorization and visualization skills. I've come to the conclusion that musicianship is heavily dependent on these cognitive skills, and unfortunately for me I have never been particularly good at either one outside of a few technical topics that I specialized in professionally years ago.

[br]Don

Originally Posted by: MusicalPage

So I've set two guitar goals (one electric and one acoustic) and one piano goal. All three are due sometime in October of this year. The electric guitar goal is to be able to play the Led Zeppelin tune "You Shook Me" by following the GuitarTricks lessons taught by Tom Finch. Reasons for this tune are blues, familiar, slow and uses a slide which I'd love to learn more about. For the acoustic guitar I picked Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" as taught on here by Dave Celentano. The reasons are similar, the tune is very familiar and reasonably slow and it also uses a 12 string which I have and would like to use more. I have not picked a specific tune for piano yet, but do know it will be one of Josh Cohen's Radio Head adaptations that he has created and now published, you can listen to Josh’s music here on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5kPwwKXVuF49grCSzBUR7Q. The piano goal will likely be the most difficult largely because I will be on my own with no instruction. So when is GuitarTricks going to create PianoTricks?

[br]I am retired with relatively few demands on my time, so I can focus quite a bit of effort on the learning tasks. Along with learning more about these instruments and the songs I'll also be focusing on memorization and visualization skills. I've come to the conclusion that musicianship is heavily dependent on these cognitive skills, and unfortunately for me I have never been particularly good at either one outside of a few technical topics that I specialized in professionally years ago.

[br]Don

Hello Don,

I`m a few years from retirement myself and and have been playing pretty steadily for about 5 1/2 months. You`ve got the time and the desire, so I think you`ll do well. I learned "Wish you were here" recently. Great song.

Good luck,

Jeff

Reasonable and achievable.

Good luck Don.

Edit:

Look for 30daypiano.com