Any sites that you guys recommend? I dot have time for a lesson- I really try to find 30 mins at least 5 days a week at my convenience.
Learn new and varied forms of music, that will fuel the need to learn new techniques and take on new ideas.
Learn new music then any theory that applies to it, let your ear develop the sound of it, then let your mind understand and relate. Any theory to it.
Also get out and play with varied musicians to get a better perspective of music.
I will relate this recent situation to you.
I had a player with over sixty years of playing experience come to ke because he wasin a rut. He believed he had lost rhe ability to learn new songs. His justification for this is he never really struggled to learn new songs, but in helping his grandson he was struggling and could not workout why this had developed, so came to me for a technique review and advice.
As we talked and i watched him play his skill and ear were great, he plays 50s music and rock'n'roll is his passion because he grew up and started playing in this era. There was not really a song he did not know or could not play, he was like a musical jukebox of what he knew, and what he knew was thousands and thousand of song.
The issue was he related the amount of what he knew rather than the content of what he knew as the bench mark of his knowlege.
What he knew was a handful of styles that covered all the songs he knew. So when he heard a songs that used G C D he could organise and order that into a 1-4-5 use or a 1-5-4 use or a -5-4-1 use etc in any key in any of the styles he knew. Add a 6th to this and he could cover any amount of song written using the progression 1-6-4-5. He knew the 6th was a minor because he could harmonise a major scale.
But his grandson was listening to music that offered more than structured chords repeating over a set amount of bars. This new music had intros, verses, bridges, middle 8s, pre choruses, key changes etc etc with no real repeating function that he is used to.
For him as a rule all his songs simply repreated the same idea, not introduce new ones as it developed.
Once he got the idea that he was not losing skills he was happy and relived. Simple fact was he had no experiece in new ideas, so and never developed the ear to hear such changes, so never had them to lose in the first place.
He left happy knowing why his situation was so.....will he learn new music? I feel he will not, his main fear was losing what he never had in the first place, but it took another 'set of ears' and some different experience to make him aware of it.
Did he know theory? He knew what he had to know and knew more about playing 'his music' than i could ever learn, so yes, he understood what needed to be played and how best to play it.
So do not think learning lots of songs is learning....you might find there is a commonality to the songs you learn and that can lead to a feeling dis-satisfaction in you playing because you are going though the motions of what you already know.
