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Hey Friend,
Whenever we are in the process of learning something, it's important to have some way to gauge your progress.
Some of us opt for scheduling regular meetings with a mentor or instructor. Some of us prefer to go the route of the three year-old and "do it myself" (I'm looking in the mirror as I say this).
And btw, I don't think "doing it myself" is always the best way to tackle a problem... but that topic can wait for another day...
Anyhoo, we all spend a lot of time with ourselves working on our various endeavors, especially learning and practicing guitar.
How do you know whether you're getting better or not?
One fairly simple way to do this is build time into your practice schedule to analyze your playing. This requires a couple steps to get intro a routine.
First, you've got to treat this like you would a job - you expect to get feedback from your boss to make sure you're doing your job the best you can. Do the work.
Second, decide what your goal is. It could be a simple as making changes between two chords, or as complex as learning to play Van Halen's "Eruption."
Third, you need to track what you find. I recommend you keep a practice journal. It doesn't have to be fancy - a simple spiral notebook will work just fine.
For every practice session, write down the date and what you worked on. If you're practicing something with a metronome, write down the meter and tempo settings. Some guitar players want to build speed - write down your starting speed on playing a riff cleanly (even if it means your setting is 10BPM!).
Again, this doesn't need to be elaborate - just some notes to give yourself a baseline.
Fourth, record yourself.
And that brings me to the fifth step - analyze what you recorded.
You likely come from one of two camps - those that believe everything they do is totally awesome, or those that are convinced everything they do just sucks.
Recording yourself will remove any question.
Now don't think I'm getting negative here. Quite the opposite.
Creating a recording will allow you to review your practice session from an outsiders standpoint. You get to get out of your own head and hear what others are hearing. It can be a true revelation - or completely terrifying!
You know the saying "the camera don't lie?" A recording is going to pinpoint exactly what you need to work on.
Video Surgeon will load and play your recording to allow you to zero in on those weak areas in your playing.
If you keep a daily journal of your practice sessions and set time in each session to analyze your progress, you will begin to know that you're getting better. Or where you need to work more.
And that's a good confidence builder - you have proof that you are improving.
The four hour demo give you enough time to test out many of the tools loaded in Video Surgeon. You can spread the demo time over a few days, so download a copy and try it out.
Peace~
Dave
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