Progress

Tonight, before I went to bed, I went to put my guitar in its case and I instead wound up playing it for about half an hour. (That's how it goes sometimes.) I played it quietly, unamplified. I've found that this is one of my favorite ways to hear this guitar. It's a very intimate, personal experience. It's late, it's quiet, it's secret.

I realized tonight, just as I stopped playing and finally put the guitar away, that I finally feel like I've made some discernible progress. I feel like all the fundamentals (scales, arpeggios, etc.) and exercises that I've been focusing on for the past six months have really started to pay off. I feel like I am the best guitarist I've ever been. I'm humble enough to know what that statement really means, though. Truth is, I was never a great guitarist to begin with. I got by with some chords and some pentatonic scales¹, but I always knew I had merely scratched the surface. For years.

It has been my goal for the past six months to dig deeper, to study and learn, to teach myself. To pick up where I left off learning eight years ago.²

Back when I was first learning to play, I was subscribed to an email newsletter by some guitarist whose name escapes me, although I think it's something like Jamie Andreas; yeah, that sounds about right. It was just something I found while I was searching online for educational materials, and I did a lot of searching online for educational materials. I remember he introduced two concepts: horizontal growth and vertical growth. Horizontal growth is using skills and concepts you've developed and applying them. Vertical growth is learning new skills and concepts.

You can see how this applies to guitar. Horizontal growth is basically learning new songs. I got by with only horizontal growth for many, many years. But vertical growth is something else entirely. Vertical growth is the acquisition of new skill and the improvement of technique. It's improving picking technique, or it's learning a new chord voicing, or it's transcribing a difficult solo. Or something. I'm just making this up as I go along, but it sounds right. I'm pretty sure it's what he talked about. Or it's how I feel about it now. Truthfully, I don't remember much of anything he said or if I gleaned anything important from the newsletters. The point is, for the first time since, I don't know, high school, I feel like I'm making vertical growth on guitar.

Don't get me wrong. I still have an exorbitantly long way to go. I still feel like an incompetent jackass on guitar a great majority of the time. But I feel like slightly less of an incompetent jackass than, say, six months ago.

¹ The best discovery I ever made in high school was that I could play the minor pentatonic scale three half-steps down from whatever major key a song was in, and it would sound good. (i.e. "Wow, A minor pentatonic sounds great in C major!") Little did I know how crippled my guitar skills would remain when I left it at that. "Oh, you're in G? I'll just noodle around with my E minor pentatonic scale." In hindsight, I feel like a phony and a fool.

² This is also why my foray into jazz has been a slow-moving one, because it's coupled with this remedial stuff.