Bad Guitar Habits

The Risk Of Getting Bad Guitar Habits With A Self-teaching Process

One of the biggest risks of self-teaching guitar is getting bad posture or bad guitar habits. Trying to learn just watching videos on Youtube it doesn’t assure you to develop a proper guitar technique and in most cases you don’t learn a technique at all. This usually doesn’t depend on the student but simply on the fact that, even having available the best material, there is no one there experienced enough to judge if what you are doing it is exactly what you are asked to do.

Moreover it is not so uncommon the case of willingful students who follow diligently all the instructions and suggestions given by a self-defined online guitar expert, only to discover in a second time that what they learnt is not exactly the best way to play. The problem is that according to many people being able to play some chords or just few scales is enough to make of them good guitarists, and as a consequence they feel entitled to show others how to play.

Unfortunately being able to teach in the proper way how to play a guitar takes a lot more than that. Several years of study is just the first step to become a good teacher, then you need the right attitude towards people, the love for the teaching process itself and last but not least an important experience in live performing. Only when a guitarist can claim all this different attributes, only then, he can seriously start thinking to become a professional teacher.

A Challenging Process Of Technique Recovery

During these many years of teaching it is impressive the amount of students we have met with technical issues and bad habits on guitar related to the lack of competence of the previous teachers. In many cases the technique was completely wrong and the students were forced to undergo enormous physical efforts just to produce musical renditions absolutely below the sufficiency level. When the situation is so compromised, getting rid of all the bad habits chords fingerpicking related become almost impossible. At this stage of the musical journey of a guitarist, many mental and physical mechanisms have been so well incorporated in the playing process that, even if completely unnatural, they are by now controlled by the brain in a sort of inconscious way. The only solution to the problem is to progressively unlearn almost everything in order to completely reset the brain and the body according to a new correct guitar technique.

The way to achieve such a remarkable result can be different for each individual student, not only because we are all physically and mentally different, but also because of the variety of possible technique related issues a guitarist can present. Usually the most common are related to the position of the left hand and of the left thumb on the fretboard, to the right hand picking technique and to the posture of the body in relation to the position of the guitar. Unfortunately all of these issues can severely affect the technique of any guitarist, and the choice of trying to cope with that in order to avoid the painful process of getting completely rid of it, it is usually the wrong one. Here at the Fingerstyle & Classical Guitar Studio, thanks to the many years of experience gained in the recovering technique process of several students, we can help you to get rid of any possible technical issue by mean of specifically targeted exercises and in a reasonable short amount of time.