John Petrucci’s Guitar Playing and Weight Lifting Analogy
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Guitar Playing and Weight Lifting analogy
If you’re stuck with something on the guitar i recommend you to read this, is an analogy that John Petrucci’s made in his book: Wild Stringdom
When you practice there will be times when you “hit the wall”, it feels like you’re stuck and it seems that no matter how much you try and practice something… you can’t master it, it seems impossible to you.
We all have been through this (even the guitar gods!), every musician and athlete has encountered this at one point or another. Don’t get discouraged by this!
For example, if you are a weightlifter and you are bench-pressing 150 pounds for weeks, and yet if you try a small incrementyou can’t lift the bar anymore, no matter how hard you try. Then one day, you try to lift more than 150 pounds and you make it!
The same process occurs when you’re stuck on the guitar, you may have problems to play a passage at 144 beats per minute, you try for weeks and nothing seems to work. Then one day you pick up your guitar and you play that passage at 160 beats per minute!
Guitar playing and weight lifting requires you to pay attention to form, if you don’t pay attention to the form you can get injuries! (like tendonitis). In the same way using the propper form helps a weight lifter to add pounds, playing the guitar in the propper form helps you to add speed and accuracy to your technique.
If you can’t play something, play it at a lower speed until you can play it mistake-free and then raise the tempo… you’ll much faster than playing it fast and sloppy since the beginning.
But as Petrucci says in his book, don’t put too much pressure on yourself,the guitar is a fun instrument to play… so the most important thing is to have fun when you play! Keep practicing!
Something that i do when i get bored of practicing is play whatever comes in my mind, just random improvisation.
What do you do when you get bored of practicing?