“Practice makes perfect.” The old adage imparted to most people trying something for the first time. What the adage doesn’t mention, though, is how boring practice is. There, I said it. Practice is BORING. So boring, in fact, that many people, myself included, have given up on learning something because they did not want to practice.
What was the thing I gave up, you ask?
Guitar.
I took guitar lessons for 6 years, and I have been playing for 15. If you’ve ever seen me play, though, you’d never be able to guess that. When I was growing up, I wanted to be Joan Jett so bad. She was everything I ever dreamed about being and more, so I took up guitar. I really liked my teachers and going to lessons, but I hated practicing. I’d much rather be outside, hanging out with friends, napping, watching paint dry; literally anything beat the monotony of practicing. Playing the same song over and over again with no real structure on how to practice or how to get better was so unappealing to me that I ended up quitting guitar lessons.
After leaving the instrument in its case for a few years, I returned to guitar to learn what I wanted to learn, and to practice on my own terms. I learned quickly teaching myself, not because I was a good teacher, but because I was practicing. After figuring out a system that worked for me, I went from only just knowing how to play a power chord to mastering barre chords. I went from only really knowing a few rock songs to being able to play though the entire American Idiot songbook. I had turned practicing into a habit, and suddenly, I was able to hold my own in my middle school rock band elective.
Why does my story matter?
Practicing doesn’t need to be so dreadful. It doesn’t need to feel pointless, monotonous, and structureless. It’s a new decade, the 2020’s. It’s time to teach people how to practice, and give them the resources on how to do it. And you won’t need a Green Day songbook.
When I was struggling to practice, I would have loved to just be able to go online, look at some easy-to-read songs I liked that had some skills I needed to learn, and play through them in a structured way.
I spent months slaving over black and white tabs. I got lost in the endless maze of YouTube, and was bored with sheet music in my songbook that had only a few chord charts here and there. Worst of all, I would practice for 6 hours one day, and then only 20 minutes the next. I would have really benefited from a way to track my practicing could make steady incline of progress as opposed to creating a graph that looked like the Bizarro coaster at Six Flags New England. I would have loved Moosiko.
Moosiko is an online companion to in-person guitar lessons. Moosiko has over 150 lessons on music from a wide variety of genres, teaching tons of chords and transitions, and provides images, chord charts, and color-coded song sheets that have chord names and mini chord charts.
If my guitar instructor had spent a whole lesson teaching me about the music and guitar theory behind suspended chords and then told me, “time to learn how to play them, go home and play through ‘Free Fallin’’ on Moosiko,” I would have picked things up much faster.
Moosiko offers a great system to suggest what you should work on and how!
Had I had Moosiko when I was learning guitar, maybe I would have stuck with it. Give Moosiko a try with your students today. Click here to request a demo.