A question that I get every so often from students is: How long does it take to learn the guitar… or more specifically, how long does it take to learn the acoustic guitar?
Or even MORE specifically: How long will it take before I become a famous rockstar in the style of John Mayer or Taylor Swift?
All of these are great questions… and they all have a very disappointing answer: “It depends…”
Michael Scott holds to key to music perfection. Read on…
I’ve written about practice a bunch of times. If you haven’t, I totally recommend going back and reading those articles… or you can just get the bullet points…
The words came out of my mouth during a lesson with a student a few weeks ago. I found myself repeating them to other students as well. At first, I’d get a quizzical look – like I’m luring the student into a trap.
Guitar cases… I own two. Both of them are gig bags (which are essentially soft/padded guitar cases made for gigging – or hauling your guitar to various gigs). They offer little protection – really just like a backpack for your guitar. I should also mention, that at any given time, I probably have about 4-6 guitars hanging around.
So why am I so against guitar cases?
First – the good thing about cases:
1. They protect your instrument. Hard cases especially.
2. If you get a humidifier – they can prolong your instrument’s life (and actually make it sound better).
There you go – two reasons. Now those are two BIG reasons. But there is another big reason that I hate cases…
…they make it so you NEVER PLAY and NEVER PRACTICE!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok. Well, they make it so **I** never play or practice.
The thing is… when I lock my guitar in a case (or zip it up in a gig back) I tend to forget about it (which is seriously bad since I have a guitar lesson blog and am a guitar teacher). Having a guitar in a case gives me one more step in the practicing process (which, since I am extremely lazy, is kind of a big deal). I have to make it so practicing is as easy and convenient as possible.
Cases DO NOT EQUAL Convenience.
So really – it’s about weighing what is important to you. If you have a really really expensive/nice guitar – yeah, you probably want to stow that bad boy in humidity controlled area in a nice hard cases. If you have a cheap(er) guitar, maybe leaving it out on the guitar stand in the living room isn’t such a bad idea.
Those are my thoughts – feel free to correct me if I’m wrong – in the comments below.
(Note: the guitar case pictured above looks so sweet. Mostly because of the leather, and the pockets. I like having a lot of pockets for stuff. I don’t personally have this case, because I don’t personally have $900 to spend on a guitar case).
