I have taught a great many students over the years. In that time, I have learned that sometimes the hardest thing about teaching a beginning student is dealing with that persons’ ideas about music and their preconceptions of what the lesson experience will be about. This is more of that ‘mental game’ stuff I am always talking about, and it is super important for a new guitar student to get their head right from the start. Very often, new students come in with totally unrealistic notions about how music is learned, how much time it will take, and what they can expect from their first year of guitar slinging. For example, I had a teenage student some years back who honestly expected to learn the entire Hendrix Woodstock album in his very first 30-minute guitar lesson. He had never even held a pick before or played anything, yet I couldn’t get him to understand how impossible this idea was. We couldn’t even listen to the CD once all the way through in 30 minutes, because it’s longer than that. I have also encountered those who don’t seem to like or care about music very much at all but still want to learn to play guitar. These students can’t name one band or artist that they like or find inspiring but somehow want lessons.
I always like to save students some time, so I thought I would scribble down three of the big ‘secrets’ about learning music and the guitar that often elude those new to this way of life. There really are no secrets to music, there are just new things to discover and new experiences to have. Still, there are some things that students need to understand to get the most out of their musical experience and not drown in a sea of frustration. Here are the Big Three:
1 - MUSIC IS EMOTIONAL CURRENCY - Music, like all forms of art, is all about expressing the feelings that make us human. What this means to you and me is you need to like it to learn it. You have to get enough of an emotional charge out of listening to your favorite music that you start wondering if you might be able to create that charge for yourself. This is the spark that drives all of us. Even now, after 40 years of playing guitar, music is still a live, emotional creature to me. Our job as players is to change the energy in the room we are in. That can’t be done by treating music as a purely technical exercise or as something that merely fills time until something better comes along. We have to be moved in order to move others. The best students come in with this love in their pocket and it makes them unstoppable. In fact, their enthusiasm is inspiring to me. You can’t be a cold fish in this game. If music doesn’t make you light up, find something else to do.
2 - MUSIC IS HARD! - New students often don’t fully understand how hard their first year of playing can be. They don’t realize that it takes an active approach to learn this stuff at a steady pace and that the gains made will be small and slow, especially at first. No matter what pitchman told you how ‘easy’ learning guitar is, the reality is that learning any instrument is a discipline much like martial arts or football that must be practiced mindfully and regularly for some time in order to get better. It’s not impossible to learn, however, and can be a great experience when approached with the right mindset. Treat your guitar lessons like you are putting on your white belt for the first time and you will do just fine.
3 - THE PAYOFF COMES LATER! - This connects directly to #2. The great emotional part of music usually comes after you have slogged through a fair amount of practice to learn your basics and get your hands somewhat under control. Learning those basics is where the discipline and craft of music happens and those are the things that lead to the expressive part. I taught a young man of about 11 years for a while who was in lessons because his mother thought music would be this big emotional release for him. The reality was that he had no interest in music at all and lessons were just one more math class he couldn’t get out of taking. He was a long way from any sort of release from music and just wanted to play basketball. This is why your head has to in the game: you are going to jam for a while before any payoffs start to occur, so settle in for the journey and hit your lessons hard. Otherwise, the good and fun stuff about music, and there’s a lot of it, will always elude you. If you don’t practice often enough for long enough, guitar playing will always be frustrating because you never get your hands, ears, and mind trained well enough to get things sounding good. In other words, you never get the landing gear up or the training wheels off. Treat guitar practice like any other workout routine and stick with it for a while, and you might surprise yourself with how much you improve. 
