I have been teaching my self on and off for almost a year now , but i can’t stay motivated , i keep thinking that i am not getting any better . how do i stay motivated?
I recently started learning to play bass guitar (2 years now). I ran into this problem pretty quick and the way I dealt with it was to identify areas of music that applied to playing bass but were different enough to make me feel like I was doing something different rather than the same old same-old. For example, some nights I ran through finger exercises, or tried to play along with a song from CD. Some nights I read music theory books. Some nights I played my acoustic guitar and made my own chord charts. I also experimented with the sounds of the strings and became familiar with the relationships between their notes and their lengths (literally. I noticed that notes on one string were exactly one third or one quarter of another string.) Even if you can’t play two notes in a row, you can pluck away and come up with your own songs – you know what you want it to sound like, so go find the notes on the fretboard. It will get you familiar with the instrument.
Pretty much all time you spend messing around with music will help you learn. You don’t always have to drill finger exercises and scales all the time, but enough to get your fingers strong, fast and accurate.
Just think of how much fun it will be when you can hang with a band and just crank out good tunes for an hour straight. Imagine yourself being able to make the guitar sing. Think of the coolest riffs you know and what it’d be like to be able to just cruise through them like silk.
Cheers.