Giving Legs to Your Dreams of Playing Guitar

With headphones covering your ears, have you ever closed your eyes and been transported inside a dream?  Traveling in your imagination, your mind whisks you away to place where you’re on stage.  With a guitar neck cradled inside your hand, every drop of emotion is squeezed from each note passing under the tips of your fingers. The white spotlight bathing your face warms the drops of sweat on your forehead; the stage floor vibrates with each note coming through the bass players amp.  Peering out across the darkened arena, are the muted outlines shaping the faces of hundreds of music fans, each one hanging on each note flowing from your soul.

Jolted back into the present, you lift the headphones from your ears while your mind bids a silent farewell to your playing guitar. Your heart is drawn toward learning, but logic pushes wishful thinking into the corner of you mind; I could never learn guitar, I don’t have the time, much less the talent.  But hold on a second Wichita; wasn’t that you on stage a few moments ago “shredding on the guitar”?

The Reality of Dreams of Playing Guitar

Your dreams can act a springboard for your learning to play guitar.  In his groundbreaking book Psycho-Cybernetics , published in 1960, Dr. Maxwell writes that a person’s central nervous system cannot tell the difference between something that is vividly imagined, and something that actually happened. So while your name was not on the marquee outside the arena, your imagination allowed the experience of playing guitar on stage.

We Have Played in Different Bands Together

A good friend named Bill Speagle taught me to play my first chords when I was nineteen. But I began playing guitar five years earlier. My first guitar was not a Fender or a Gibson, but a household broom.

When I was in my early teens, I lived in a chaotic environment and spent many hours alone. When lonely, and wanting to escape, I would put a record on the stereo, grab the household broom and imagine myself playing guitar.

With the driving beat of my mom’s Jimmy Reed records playing on the living room stereo, my imagination turned the broom in my arms into a pearl white Fender Stratacaster. The magazine rack beside the stereo was a Marshall Amp Stack, and the floor where I was standing became the stage at the Starlight Lounge. When the music began, I would be laying it down with the band. Just like Jimmy did.

As the music played, the mirror on the living room told me that I was making all the right moves. Others were moving to music the band was playing.  For as long as the record played, I was on stage. More than  bristles of yellow straw, held together by three rows of red stitching attached to the end of a round four foot yellow stick, my broom guitar took me to a place I wanted to go, but couldn’t go in real life. And it set the stage for my learning to play guitar.

Lost inside the safety of my dreams, I had no way of knowing that a few a short years later, I would be standing on a real stage playing guitar. Standing in front of the stereo, looking at myself in the mirror while I played broom guitar laid the groundwork for my learning to play.  Your imagination is powerful asset. Use it well and your dreams of playing guitar can become a reality.

Three Sure-Fire Ways to Stoke Your imagination

1. Engage Your Imagination.
Go into a room where you can be alone without the fear of interruption. Put on some music; stand in front of a mirror and play air guitar.  Better yet, use a real guitar or a broom.  See yourself in the mirror and use your imagination to transport yourself to your playing guitar in whatever circumstance moves you. The mirror helps because research has shown that we receive over 70% of our information through our sight.

2. Use Details to Enhance Your Imagination.
The more detail about what’s going on around you, the better.  What color is the carpet on the stage floor.  What kind of guitar are you playing?  Are you playing in a band or solo?

3. Physical Activity
Often times it’s easier to engage you imagination while actively involved in a physical activity. For me, walking is the easiest way to sign up for a mind cruse.

Repetition is the key to multiplying the effectiveness of your imagination.  Use you imagination to propel your dreams, giving them legs and making your playing guitar a reality.

Your thumb jumps off the channel changer the moment you see a young guy in his late teens setting with some friends and playing guitar. Envious looks cover their faces as they watch him glide from one chord to the next.

Slowly the camera pans back, revealing a gorgeous twenty two year old model that lives on magazine covers. With check book blue eyes and glistening blond hair, she breathes, “you’re so good, play another song, just for me”.

I Want To Play Guitar Like Him
As the guitar man dials up another tune, the voice of a confident man say’s, “would you like to be this guy”? Good fortune is with you my friend, because you can also be playing guitar just like this guy, in only one month.

Setting the bag of tortilla chips aside, you lean forward, I’ve always wanted to play guitar, maybe this is my chance. The man continues, all you have to do is follow my easy Step by Step, Quick & Easy Guitar Method, and in thirty short days, you can be playing guitars for your friends.

The camera turns back and you see the young lady swaying back and forth to the rhythms played by our friend. Seeing her longing smile of approval, you hear, this could be you in one month. Send $39.95, check, money or credit card. Take action now.

Setting up on the couch you think, what a deal. Now is my chance to learn guitar, and in thirty days. Ten minutes later, $39.95 moves to the “pay to” side of your credit card statement. As you drift off to sleep, the image of your cradling a guitar in your arms, making music as your friends look on fills your dreams.

The next week, your package arrives. Ripping open the box, you find an array of chord charts, practice schedules, easy to follow tips, along with an order form for an easy to follow, simple plan, to secure a recording contract.

Learning Guitar In The Real World
One week later, with sore fingers and the sound of muffled strings and foul notes ringing in your ears, a tinge of reality enters your thoughts. Could it be that learning guitar is more difficult than I believed? Leafing through the instructional material, you search for a phone number, maybe a tip line that can you call. You think, maybe I’m doing something wrong. . Why does everything seem so difficult to do? You find no phone number for a tip line, only a copy of the receipt, thanking you for the order and letting you know that your credit card is now lighter by $39.95.

Gathering up your Step by Step, Quick & Easy Guitar Method materials, you slip them quietly into a drawer, promising yourself that one of these days, when you have more time, you will learn to play guitar.

Here on planet earth, there is nothing quick, easy or simple about learning to play guitar. And there is one single method or strategy that works for everyone. Some learn guitar within a structured scholastic environment, others through recorded lesson material or by picking things up from friends. Usually people learn through a combination of different methods. Regardless of the vehicle, you learn one thing at a time, and then move on to the next. And with practice things, begin to come together and sounds that use to racket, now sounds musical.

When understanding the difficulty and dedication that it takes to play guitar, people ask themselves, is it really worth all of the effort? And it’s good question. Ask someone, but not the guy who tried to learn, but gave up because he didn’t have the time. Find someone who has been playing guitar for ten or more years. Ask them if it was worth all the challenges and difficult times they went through in learning to play. They will say yes, and they will also tell you they can’t imagined their lives without being able to play guitar. Here is the bottom line. Playing guitar is not easy, but for those of us who play, our lives are better places to be.

Next time – The critical element all guitar players have, and how to get it.