{"id":14081,"date":"2019-11-30T05:00:02","date_gmt":"2019-11-30T13:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/?p=14081"},"modified":"2019-11-27T15:53:59","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T23:53:59","slug":"its-never-too-late-to-start-starting-to-play-guitar-as-an-adult-has-unique-challenges-and-opportunities-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/its-never-too-late-to-start-starting-to-play-guitar-as-an-adult-has-unique-challenges-and-opportunities-2\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Never Too Late to Start: Starting to Play Guitar as an Adult has Unique Challenges\u2014and Opportunities"},"content":{"rendered":"
From the Fall 2016 issue<\/a> of Classical Guitar | BY DEREK HASTED<\/h5>\n

The phone rings; I answer it. The voice on the other end says, \u201cHello, I\u2019ve been\u00a0to your website and I\u2019d like to learn guitar, but I wonder if I\u2019ve left it too late in life?\u201d<\/p>\n

That one question is the clarion cry of many of the inquiries I receive, and it\u2019s why I\u2019ve found myself teaching 39 adult students one-on-one, and precisely zero youngsters at this moment.<\/p>\n

Many children come grudgingly to classical lessons because really they want to play electric guitar, or their parents want them to learn to play an instrument that\u2019s \u201cnot too expensive to buy.\u201d Adults, by contrast, are always self-motivated, and their initial enthusiasm is often boundless and matched by their total lack of coordination!<\/p>\n

To those of you either struggling to learn guitar as an adult or returning to it later in life\u2014no, you most certainly haven\u2019t left it too late to achieve something remarkable.<\/p>\n

So, what\u2019s different about adult learners? Once you leave college or university, most skills are ones you build on, not new skills you have to learn. But starting to learn to play guitar is not only a new skill for an adult beginner, but a complex one that involves sight, sound, touch, reading, planning, reasoning, timing, and interpretation. But it\u2019s also some of the best brain food possible.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s address some of the issues many adult learners bring up:<\/p>\n

\u201cIT\u2019S\u00a0TOO\u00a0HARD.\u201d<\/h4>\n

No, it\u2019s not. It\u2019s a challenge that needs to be broken into smaller problems. Adults want to run before they can walk, and teaching yourself is not straightforward\u2014how can you find a mistake when you believe you are following the instructions? A skilled teacher can, and will, tailor lessons on a per-student basis to get that sweet spot where effort and achievement are at their best balance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI WISH\u00a0I HAD\u00a0DONE\u00a0THIS\u00a0AS\u00a0A\u00a0CHILD.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Motivation is a given, but frustration can eat at even the most promising adult learner. But adults forget that adults learn just as quickly as someone much younger, if only because they have considerable patience and just one subject for their evening homework!<\/p>\n

\u201cMY FINGERS\u00a0ARE\u00a0TOO\u00a0STIFF.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Actually, no, they are simply untrained. I can prove this: Any of you out there who can play well know exactly what your two hands have to do, but if you sit your guitar on your lap the other way around and try to fret a chord with your plucking hand, you\u2019ll soon find that your fingers just cannot get into position. Adult learners have yet to learn the motor skills players take for granted, but it doesn\u2019t take too long to master them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWHY?\u201d<\/h4>\n

This, of course, is the one word that young children throw at adults to question everything that comes their way. Except perhaps in music. Here, it\u2019s the adults who want to know why\u2014they need to know how to store the information they\u2019ve been given, and that means understanding it and filing it away correctly. Whether it\u2019s, \u201cWhy is that a second finger on that B when it was a third finger in the previous piece?\u201d\u00a0or, \u201cWhy does that piece have both Ab and G# in it?\u201d the learning process is gloriously two-way and constantly veering off-track.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019M FRUSTRATED\u00a0WITH MY\u00a0LACK\u00a0OF\u00a0PROGRESS.\u201d<\/h4>\n

That really shouldn\u2019t happen anymore. The canon of guitar music has changed radically in the last 40 years, and the sheer wealth of appealing, comfortable repertoire is now so large that I struggle to stay on top of it all. Unlike children, adults will have strong preferences on the music that they like, and although it\u2019s the duty of a teacher to help them explore new genres, their favorite styles can be a potent way to unlock the barriers to progress. Adults will seldom make as many mistakes in a typical workday as they make in one music lesson, and adults really don\u2019t like to feel like they are failing. However, picking yourself up, dusting yourself off, and trying to regain your dignity is the only way to make progress, and provided the teacher is sympathetic to the feelings of failure, frustration will soon pass.<\/p>\n

\u201cIT STILL HAS MISTAKES.\u201d<\/h4>\n

We can blame our performing professional colleagues for this! The classical guitar fights back much harder than most orchestral instruments\u2014with two hands to make one note, with polyphony, with the problem of not even knowing which finger frets the bottom note of a chord until everything is decoded, with the need to position eight fingers to an accuracy of a few millimeters, the chance of making a mistake is high. In addition, learners forget that the guitar they hear on the radio and most recordings is not how a guitar sounds while it is being learned. Indeed, a quick trawl of YouTube will show you the differences when players of different levels of expertise perform a piece. You might aspire to play like the best, but it can be discouraging to constantly measure yourself against the best. Keep your expectations reasonable.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019M\u00a0BORED WITH\u00a0IT.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Adults are (largely) sociable beings who like company, and guitar can seem like an insular hobby. Except that guitar ensembles are a great way to enjoy mutual encouragement, a big sound, lots of laughter, and a chance to realize that ultimately, playing guitar is about what you hear, not about what you read and do. Guitar isn\u2019t a lonely hobby when you can find like-minded players!<\/p>\n

\u201cWHEN\u00a0DO I FINALLY\u00a0GET\u00a0TO\u00a0THE\u00a0END\u00a0OF\u00a0MY LEARNING?\u201d<\/h4>\n

Well, we all know the answer to that: There is an astonishingly large amount of high-quality guitar music out there, and virtually every piece brings its own challenges. As your experience of guitar music in general, and music construction in particular, starts to grow, a large percentage of repertoire can start to look vaguely familiar, because the set of universal building blocks in guitar music is surprisingly large. But there\u2019s always something new and exciting to work at overcoming.<\/p>\n

\u201cWHAT\u00a0ABOUT\u00a0MUSIC\u00a0THEORY?\u201d<\/h4>\n

I suspect some of us who learned music theory as children will instinctively recoil at that question, because music theory can contain a whole raft of concepts that aren\u2019t relevant to classical guitar. But there are many aspects of theory that adults, used to finding patterns in chaos, will find helpful to their sight-reading and analysis. Being shown examples of theory in action is something that many adults find helps cement a new piece or a new fact into place much more rapidly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI DIDN\u2019T\u00a0PRACTICE\u00a0MUCH\u00a0THIS\u00a0WEEK.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Children already have so many routines and regimens in their education lives that fitting in music practice is usually a little easier for them than it is for adults, who may have elderly parents, cars to get to the shop, grocery shopping to do, a boss who makes them work late at the office, and so on.<\/p>\n

But guitar isn\u2019t a race to a destination, it\u2019s a journey, and the scenery is all along the journey, not just at the destination! A good teacher will be able to change the lesson on-the-fly to take account of a student\u2019s achievement, and the student\/teacher relationship is always a rich and varied one when teaching adults. And just like a real journey, there will be places where the desire to stop and admire that particular piece of scenery just can\u2019t be resisted.\b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Fall 2016 issue of Classical Guitar | BY DEREK HASTED The phone rings; I answer it. The voice on the other end says, \u201cHello, I\u2019ve been\u00a0to your website and I\u2019d like to learn guitar, but I wonder if I\u2019ve left it too late in life?\u201d That one question is the clarion cry of many of the inquiries I receive, and it\u2019s why I\u2019ve found myself teaching 39 adult students one-on-one, and precisely zero youngsters at this moment. Many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":4943,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[38,37,39,40],"class_list":["post-14081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stories","tag-adult","tag-derek-hasted","tag-learner","tag-starter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/09\/Guitar-Tips-Aduilt-Beginners-How-To-Start-Playing-Guitar-Beginning-Guitar-Classical-Lesson-e1625607813805.jpg?fit=800%2C427&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/classicalguitarmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}