There is a point that all guitar players must experience in their life. It is the moment when they realize that they have been playing the same thing over and over again, yet they are not improving as much as they would like. They can play a few songs, but nothing more. They know it will take time, but it seems so hard to get better.

It’s a common problem, with a surprisingly simple solution. The reason why people plateau in their guitar playing is because of how we learn to play in the first place. You can only get so good by imitating others. Once you reach this point, you need to shift from copying what others do to learning how to practice on your own. This is the moment when you become a real musician.

A study published in Nature Neuroscience found that while we imitate, our brain uses the same neural pathways as when we move by ourselves. If I asked you to raise your hand right now, it would be no different than if I showed you someone else raising their hand and asked you to imitate them. Our brains don’t differentiate between the two situations (even though logically we know there is a difference).

There is a problem with this type of learning: It forces us to completely rely on others in order to

There’s a common belief that playing the guitar is relatively easy. I’m not sure whether this is because of the way we see it on-screen—Tom Hanks in That Thing You Do! strumming along, or the countless YouTube videos of kids performing pop songs in front of their webcams—but most people seem to think that you don’t need to practice much, and that you can be good fairly quickly.

But this isn’t true. Playing guitar well is difficult, and if you want to play it well, you have to practice a lot.

The problem with practicing guitar is that there’s a lot of work involved, and no one wants to do work. We like shortcuts. We like things that are fast and easy. We want to optimize for productivity and efficiency, and we usually find ways to justify taking these shortcuts even when we know they’re counterproductive in the long term.

This leads us to two common difficulties:

1. We get overwhelmed by how much work there is involved with learning how to play guitar, so we stop practicing altogether, or never start at all.

2. We practice, but we don’t get very good results from our efforts, so we eventually quit anyway; feeling frustrated, we blame

Anyone who has tried to learn guitar has felt the frustration of not being able to play as well as they would like. The problem is that novice players tend to think that if they just practice more, their playing will improve. But the reality is that more practice alone does not guarantee better performance.

So what does? The key lies in how you practice. A new study by researchers at Baycrest Health Sciences provides insight into how exactly we can hone our skills through practice to achieve peak performance.

“Our research shows it is possible for people to improve their cognitive control, or ability to pay attention, through intensive and focused attention training,” says Dr. Joaquin Anguera, a post-doctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest and lead author of the paper published in the journal NeuroImage. “When participants learned to allocate attention in a specific way over multiple training sessions, their brain activity changed and allowed them to perform better on tests of cognitive control.”

Going from not being able to play guitar at all to being able to play the most complex pieces is something that can be learned by anyone. It’s not as hard as you think. In fact, it’s not even close to being hard.

Most people have this idea that great guitar players are born with some kind of innate talent (similar to the way people think surgeons must have been born with a steady hand). Or they think that great players just practice more. Neither is true. Great guitar players learn the same skills and use the same methods as any other player – they just do it better.

It’s a matter of concentration and learning specific skills. The skills themselves aren’t hard; in fact, they’re quite easy to understand when explained properly. But if you’re going to master them, you need to put in some dedicated time and effort into practicing them regularly.

I’m talking about things like learning how to focus your energy on what you want instead of what you don’t want; or how to make your fingers move faster without tension; or how to choose the right notes for a solo so that it sounds good every time you play it; or how to play with dynamics and expression so that every note has meaning and purpose behind it; or how to

When I was a teenager, the only way I could stop myself from thinking about my problems was to practice playing guitar. The more frustrated I felt, the harder I worked. So why did I get so much better so slowly?

It was probably because I spent most of my practice time doing things that were not very difficult. In fact, they were too easy. I played scales and chords over and over; or if I wanted to work on exercises, they were only moderately challenging.

I could never put in the kind of intense effort necessary to master something really hard. So at night when I would go practice in my room, instead of working on difficult pieces or improving my technique, I would just play easy stuff like scales and easy songs. It’s no wonder that it took me years to improve as a guitar player.

The problem is that when we first start learning something new, everything is hard. So by default we tend to practice what is easy because it feels good—it feels like we’re making progress when in reality we’re not learning anything new. It’s a lot effort with little results (wasted energy).

But after putting in some time (a few months), there are some things that become easier than others. This is where you have

I’m sure you’ve felt it. You’re watching a guitarist play and something about his or her playing just hits you hard. It’s not the notes they are playing, because there are no notes being played. You’re watching them practice.

Maybe they are working on some difficult passage or maybe they are just running scales up and down the fretboard, but whatever it is, it sounds good to your ears. It’s musical. It makes you want to practice too.

Why does this happen?

Not all practicing sounds good. In fact, most practicing probably doesn’t sound good to anyone else. So what makes this particular kind of practicing worth listening to?

The answer is that the person doing the practicing is exploring a musical idea through their instrument in real time, and taking you along with them as they do so. They are constantly discovering new things about their playing, and about music in general, and that’s what makes it interesting for you to listen to.

Learning how to play the acoustic guitar is one of those things that a lot of people want to do at least once in their life. The problem is that many people never actually get around to it, usually because they’re intimidated by the learning curve. After all, what good is a beautiful instrument if you don’t know how to play it?

The thing about learning an instrument is that it takes time and practice. You can’t just pick up a guitar and expect to immediately start playing like Mark Knopfler or Jimmy Page. If you can commit to practicing for about 30 minutes per day, though, then you can be well on your way towards becoming a great guitarist.

Here are some tips for getting started:

• Start by learning the basics of chords, strumming patterns and finger picking. Until you learn these basic concepts, it’ll be very difficult to play songs.

• Try not to get discouraged right away when you realize that some progress will take time and dedication on your part.

• Don’t try to take shortcuts when learning how to play the guitar. Start with some simple exercises that focus on technique and gradually move into more complex territory as your skills improve.

We hope these tips help you get started