For me is listening to music and make sure I hear it the way it was meant.

Good acoustics in the venue always help me play better.

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Being able to play and enjoy music is a gift that's often taken for granted.

Don't leave home without it!

Money has always been a tremendous motivator for me.

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You dig?

Eat your Wheetabix.Seriously practice and lots of it and listen and try to play as many genres of music as you can and then follow that up with more practice.

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'65 Strat,65 Mustang,65 Jaguar,4 more Strats,3 vintage Vox guitars,5 Vox amps,'69 Bassman with a '68 2-15 Bassman cab,36 guitars total-15asst'd amps total,2 vintage '60s Hammond organs & a myriad of effects-with a few rare vintage ones.

Directed practice (as already mentioned); I've become convinced that aimless messing around may actually hurt my skills but as a minimum, it doesn't accomplish anything.

The other factor is: having an audience and even better, an audience that's listening. It can be just one person or 100 but as I see it, if they're taking their time to listen to me, my part is to do my best for them.

The one thing that made me better was when I made a trip to Alabama and found a country dirt road and I followed it to crossroads. I sat done with my guitar and waited until midnight......

I think you all know the rest of the story!



Really just playing more makes me better.

Big Jay pretty much nailed it but I also find I sometimes reach an impass or a platau much like how a body builder often does. I find if I am trying to improve a certain aspect of my playing or maybe there's a chord shape that my hands don't like to contort into and I am having difficulty getting it into "muscle memory" My approach is to persistently keep practicing that one thing until I am royally sick of it and then change to something else that is completely diffferent. If the "something different" is also new to me I can usually work on it until it becomes natural to me or at least until I start getting the hang of it and then if I go back to the difficult thing I frequently have a breakthrough. If the "something completely different" from the trouble spot is same old, same old, stuff I've always done, then the breakthrough won't happen because I haven't grown. I find in order to grow you have to grow. Sounds moronic, I know but if you have trouble growing in one area try growing in another area and the new growth will positively affect other areas.

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Just think of how awesome a guitar player you could have been by now if you had only spent the last 10 years practicing instead of obsessing over pickups and roasted maple necks.

Letting more light into my usual dark practice room. A brighter outlook on things. Here Comes The Sun.

Great post lomitus and I agree 100%

I think we all tend to hit those plateaus at one point or another...others may call it a "rutt", LOL! I absolutely agree that one of the best ways to get around that is to work on something completely different...I think it's part of that whole "different perspective" thing that I tend to embrace so dearly. When you get to a point that you can no longer see the proverbial trees thru the forest, it's time to stand on a table...or crawl under it...or just stand on your head for a while to see things differently.

Also somewhat related, I also find that if you're really having problems with a certain or specific piece, sometimes just putting it down completely and coming back to it later...sometimes much later makes a big difference too. Ok...not a guitar thing but right now I'm working on trying to learn "Great Gig in the Sky" by Pink Floyd...on piano (well...keyboard at least). Ok...I'm -not- a keyboard player really...I'm a guitar player and drummer who does some "fluff" keyboard work in my studio for fill on recordings and such. Because of that though when I'm trying to learn something on keys...particularly something complex and/or with lots of chords, sometimes it really takes me a while to learn. In this case, I started trying to learn "Gig" about 6 months ago...I had learned most of the basic chords and such but really just wasn't playing it well -at all-. Well as they say, "life happens"...a bunch of other stuff came up and I wasn't really down in the studio much at all for a while there, let alone working on anything keyboard related. About a month ago however I got back to working on Gig and yea...I kind of had to go back to the beginning and start over again but this time it was -much- easier and I'm almost at the point where I can actually do the tune justice. Give me another month on it and I think I could probably even do it on stage, LOL!

Anyways, while I stand by what I said earlier in that a great deal of this all really just comes down to practice, I probably should have added that sometimes it's the -way- we practice that makes a difference. Also to that I would add that in my mind there is a difference between actually practicing and "jamming". Yea...I'll sit around a lot of times by myself and just jam...if nothing else it keeps my fingers limber and those calluses built up but in my mind it's -not- the same thing as sitting down to actually practice. No, I don't usually sit there and just run thru scales and such...that tends to drive me totally nuts, but I will sit down and work on specific chops, riffs, chords and anything else I may be having problems with, doing those repetitive things until I get it firmly implanted in to that "muscle memory" (great expression...I love that!).




Thank you. It's nice to know that someone around here actually appreciates my often over-blown and occasionally mindless ramblings .

Peace,
Jim

doing...or not when i'm not in the mood.

cheers

A big fat cheque used to do the trick but more seriously...

A good tight well rehearsed band, that could also improvise with
telepathic sensual oneness.....well something like that anyway.

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If I force myself to do a lot of sight reading with a metronome from the Real Book (Jazz charts).... Any playing I do 24 hours after this tends to come a lot easier...

Kind of like heavy lifting of the brain...

Attitude, mood, tea, a new pick and fresh strings.
JMHO- N8)

Wrong state..shouldn't that be Mississippi?

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08 Fender Highway One Tele-Sunburst
09 Squier Custom Tele II-Blonde
04 Squier Standard Strat Antiqueburst
07 Washburn D10SCE natural with Rosewood backing
Fender Mustang II amp


Experience is the best teacher