Originally Posted By: MarioD
Eddie, you should elaborate on the practice thing. You must practice the right things in the right way. Practice things until you thoroughly get it them move on to something new.


How many posts do we get saying things like "How do I recognize the keys that songs are in?" and "How can I get faster on the guitar?" That short answer is "Do the work."

You put in the work. You learn the neck. You play scales faster and faster and faster. Major, minor, pentatonic... I mean why do they think we can somehow virtually do your ear training for you? If you don't know notes on a keyboard, or a fretboard, how can we explain tone matching?

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I will respectfully disagree about the demo songs. I like to hear what the styles are capable of sounding like in good equipment and with good players. Maybe just make them so then can not be transferred to the chord track?


I'd settle for that solution. I literally despise it when people start posting awful stuff made from provided demo songs like maniacs in December trying to get their post count up so they can win a free copy of the new version coming out. They end up no better of a player and no smarter about music when they get awarded free software that does literally everything for them. That just propagates the "pretender" mentality. I also call it the "participation trophy" mentality.

Our age group is probably the last generation before the microwave mentality emerged. Everything is a rush to completion with no regard for self satisfaction that comes from doing it the hard (right?) way. This is a very nitpicky example, but I will say it anyway, despite the fact that reveals another aspect of my Sheldon Cooper side. Wife 3.0 once put something into the microwave and set the timer for 60 seconds. At 52 seconds she opened the door and took out the cup. And I asked her "Why didn't you just set the timer for 52 seconds? Were those 8 seconds you saved critical to your day? What are you going to do with those 8 seconds that will make your life better?" (This is the same kind of snarky line of questioning I use when people crow about their computer taking too long to do something. "Does loading a program in 4.5 seconds really enhance your life from the old days when that program took 6.9 seconds to load?" That comment typically comes from people who don't understand that programs run in RAM, and call their hard drives "memory". As we all know, hard drives are storage, not memory.)

There aren't short cuts to proficiency in any field. Witness the MCSE Boot Camp paper tiger MCSEs. They cost a fortune, they force feed you exactly what will be on the tests, you get your cert, you head out into your job and realize you don't know anything hands on, just the concepts that were enough to get your cert. That is the computer version of recording demo songs, slapping AI lyrics on them, and calling them your own work.

Do the work. Put the time in. There is far more to music than knowing where the start button is.