When you start learning a new piece (a song with chords, a single part), to achieve results (memorization) much faster, you need to invest certain resources. These resources include time, emotion, and for some, even money.
Every sensible person wants to spend as few resources as possible and reap the greatest benefits. This is normal, because we don’t want to spend days, weeks, or even months learning just one song. The faster, the better.
The main problem is that very often, the “quick” effect only brings a one-time result. You can learn a song in a day. You can do it in an hour. You can even learn it in a minute. And what will happen in the end?! In the end, of course, the performance will be poor, the lyrics will be lost or completely missing, the tempo will constantly fluctuate, and the rhythm, unfortunately, will jump around.
Result: Friends and acquaintances will praise you, and you’ll find and play more and more songs every day, constantly expanding your arsenal, but the quality of these songs will deteriorate. Plus, you’ll wonder why just a year ago you could easily play several songs from memory, but now you can’t even remember the intro.
Why?! Because you didn’t have the initial base, the foundation, or the foundation on which any musician’s performance should be built.
It’s a different matter if you focus solely on quality. The “better” effect yields results that last for years, because you’re practicing ONE piece as much as your current technique allows, gradually improving it. What’s the end result?!
Yes, you won’t be able to play a thousand songs, nor will you be able to play a hundred different parts at a decent level. But, and this is the most important thing, using skills honed to the point of automatism, you can spend first a month, then a week, then a day, or even an hour mastering a song or part and playing it immediately afterward.
By constantly repeating mechanically designed movements, you’ll instantly appreciate the techniques and methods needed to learn a piece quickly.
As a result, you’ll learn far fewer pieces, and your friends, naturally, won’t understand why you only played them a few songs, even though you’ve been practicing guitar for a long time. But by using your initial learning time wisely, you’ll save a significant amount of time in the future, and very soon you’ll feel like you can play almost anything—all you need to do is pick up notes or tabs and play familiar phrases once or twice.
So, the choice is yours! Play a lot of songs, but expect a more tolerable guitarist; or take a very serious approach to playing a single song (or part), but sacrifice the number of pieces.
