Bad timing

One main reason, I think, that some guitar players become great and some (like me) struggle has a lot to do with timing and motivation, specifically the timing of motivation.

I was reading up on my new god (praise JP) and his practice routine. He said that when he was younger, he practiced six hours a day, but now that he's a professional musician and has a different schedule he practices about an hour or two a day.

Six hours a day?

Really?

Shit.

I can handle an hour or two, but six?

Herein lies the problem. I have all the motivation in the world right now to be a better guitarist. I don't want to change the world or play Madison Square Garden, but I want to at least be good enough that I could play MSG if I had the inclination. I want to be good enough to be able to pull off the progressive rock recordings I want to make and not sound like a complete hack. Trouble is, I'm now 37 years old, with a full-time career, a wife, a house, pretty much a busy, adult life. I struggle to practice six hours a week, let alone six hours a day. Because of this my improvement has been glacially slow. I have improved, but I can only imagine how much I could've improved over the past year and a half if I had the time to practice even two hours a day.

That got me thinking to my childhood. I started playing when I was 11 years old, and although I didn't come from a musical family, I still had a pretty good head start. Unfortunately, my motivation was in the dumper. I started off OK, but I had a hard time staying motivated because my instructor, although a good guitarist, wasn't the kind of teacher I needed to learn the style of music I wanted to learn. So after about two years I stopped going to lessons and stopped playing pretty much altogether.

I picked up the guitar again in junior high school. I started taking lessons again, but my instructor was just what I needed. He was young, he was a rocker, he was cool and he taught me exactly what I needed. My motivation was high, I was practicing, and I was happy. Then he left for college, and I got another instructor who didn't fit with my goals and I ended up stopping my lessons. Unlike before, I kept playing with my band and learning songs, but, with apologies to my former bandmates, I didn't put nearly as much time into practice as I should have and I could've been a much, much better guitarist. A good instructor would've kept me motivated, which is very hard to do on your own.

I know I've told some of these stories before, but I'm telling them again, this time to highlight the lost time in between. We're talking years where all I had to do was go to school. I had hours upon hours of free time to devote to my playing, but I had no motivation. I look back at all the time wasted sitting in front of the TV, playing video games, and yes, even doing homework (when you're an adult you realize how much of your school work was just busy work) and think of what could've been if I would've been practicing my guitar.

It's bad timing. When I had the time, I had no motivation. Now that I have motivation, I have no time. I'm wary of taking lessons again, or taking Berklee's online classes, because I worry that I won't have the time to practice and I'll just end up wasting money. I've spent so much time recently looking at guitars and buying new guitars, but I realize that all I really needed was time, which, for the most part, is free.

Sorry to be such a downer today. I know I can't change the past. I just need to figure out how to work more practice time into my schedule.