Day 17 - Starting over

After a few days break I came back and tried to start the next set of lessons. After struggling for a while I came to the realization that I was doing things very wrong. I wrote a while back that I was relying too much on looking on what my fingers were doing to get them into the right places. Well, I kinda assumed that with time things would fall into place naturally but that hasn't really happened and I'm still unable to get my fingers into the right place without looking at them. This means my attention is divided 2 ways as I glance up at the screen to see what I should be playing next and then look back down at the frets to get my fingers in place, inevitably missing the note, which pauses the game. So I end up playing stop-start note by note until I memorize what the pattern is and no longer need to look up at the screen at all. Not only is this clearly a rubbish way of learning, the position of being hunched over so I can see the neck of the guitar means my back starts to ache pretty quickly. Not good.

I decided there's no point trying to continue like this, so I started the lessons over from the beginning, making an effort not to look at my fingers this time. While it took a bit of getting used to, I breezed through the lessons quite quickly and managed to complete some of the ones that had tripped me up previously much easier than before. I played as far as the White Stripes song and managed to play that better than before, it's much easier when you can look at the screen to see what to play and have your fingers naturally go to the correct position. Kind of like touch typing, even if you make a mistake you know which way to move your fingers based on what comes up on screen when you press. Actually, I realised that the feedback of being able to see on screen where your fingers are without having to look at them is a great advantage over traditional learning. Previously when trying to make adjustments I'd often find my fingers going the wrong way; to higher strings when they should have gone to lower and vice-versa, but once I'd made the adjustment I was able to find my way around the fretboard a lot easier. Hopefully this will stand me in good stead going forward.