Intermediate level players are often technically accomplished but find themselves stuck and unable to progress to the next level.
The Challenges Faced by Intermediate Guitar Players
Intermediate players usually face three challenges:
- They’ve made it past the beginner levels with their technique, but they are now stuck and unable to make progress.
- They can learn and play songs, but do not understand music theory and want to understand how music works.
- They want to start working on learning lead guitar, but are quickly overwhelmed by the complexity of the subject.
Helping Intermediate Players With Their Technique
Technique problems often have two main causes:
- A collection of bad-habits that have been picked up over the years, that need to be replaced with effective techniques.
- Not understandind what exercises to use to reach the goals they have.
Intermediate players often find themselves practising certain exercises because someone recomended it, not because that specific exercise is a step forwards to a specific goal they want to achieve.
Something we do at the very first lesson is find out what it is you want to achieve with your playing. Then we put together a plan that goes from “today” to your goals, that guides you through the material you need to tackle in order to become the guitarist that you want to be.
Helping Intermediate Guitarists Tackle Music Theory
Learning music theory can be a daunting challenge, especially for the intermediate guitarist. Having worked their way from being a beginner to having a competent level of technique and ability, learning music theory can feel like going back to Day 1 of learning guitar.
And this is before the challenges of figuring out where to start and what on Earth it all means… not to mention the big question: Why are you learning it in the first place?
Often, music theory is approached from the perspective of learning it for the sake of it, rather than learning it and using it as a specilised tool to help you with your guitar playing.
Music theory is a fantastic tool that can:
- Help you understand the harmonic and melodic structure of songs
- Help you write your own chord progressions and songs
- Help you improvise and be creative
And our approach is to use music theory as a tool that lets you do something on your guitar.
Whether you want to write songs in the style of Taylor Swift, or analyse a Mozart piano rondo and write your own rock guitar instrumentals, we’ll help you with a personalised plan and careful guidance through what is often perceived as a difficult subject.
And well, often music theory is a difficult subject. But don’t worry, you’ll never understand why other people think that.
Helping Intermediate Guitarists Learn Lead Guitar
Often, the intermediate guitarist has well developed rhythm skills, but they struggle with developing their lead guitar and improvisation skills.
Attempts at improvising often result in their playing sounding like a scale and completely lacking the mysterious factor known as “musicality”.
Fortunately, we firmly beleive that anything that can be percevied can be measured, and anything that can be measured can be understood… and we have proven methods used by 100s of students for breaking down what makes an improvisation sound musical into a series of simple and manageable exercises that we can guide you through.
By carefully guiding your focus on different elements of music and integrating them together with a series of simple and fun exercises, you will quickly find yourself being able to jam along to backing tracks, jamming with other students and being able to jam with your friends and other musicians.
As your abiltiy expands we’ll guide you through using more and more of the fretboard and learning advanced techniques, while keeping a high focus on ensuring that at every step we are focussing on making our playing musical.
Putting It All Together
While the challenges you face as an intermediate level guitarist might feel overhwelming, the good news is that they can be overcome. 9 times out of 10 it’s simply a case of ensuring you do the right things the right way, and that’s what we are going to help you with: We can put together a plan for you that goes step by step from where you are today, to where you would like to be, and we’ll guide you through that plan, every step of the way.
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