Steve Stine Guitar Podcast

Why Your Guitar Playing Has Hit a Wall and How to Smash Through It

• Steve Stine

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Every guitarist knows that dreaded feeling of hitting a wall—practicing regularly but seeing no real progress. In this candid discussion, Steve Stein from Guitar Zoom Academy tackles the frustrating phenomenon of guitar plateaus head-on, offering practical wisdom that can transform your playing journey.

Steve breaks down the primary causes of plateaus with refreshing clarity. The culprits? Lack of structure, where random YouTube tutorials create a disjointed learning experience. Ineffective repetition, where players go through the motions without truly focusing on improvement. Absence of feedback, leaving players unable to identify their technical blind spots. And the comfort zone trap—the tendency to stick with what we already know rather than challenging ourselves with new material.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is Steve's no-nonsense approach to breaking through these barriers. He emphasizes the need for clear, specific goals rather than vague aspirations. He advocates for focused practice sessions where quality trumps quantity. And perhaps most importantly, he highlights the transformative power of community and feedback—those "aha moments" that can only come from interaction with more experienced players who can spot what you're missing.

Whether you've been playing for months or decades, this episode delivers the wake-up call many guitarists need. As Steve says, "There's no magic pill here. You have to do the work." But with the right structure, focus, and guidance, that work becomes infinitely more rewarding. Ready to break through your plateau? This conversation is your first step toward renewed progress and passion for the guitar. Connect with Guitar Zoom Academy to build your personalized roadmap to guitar mastery today!

Links:

Check out the GuitarZoom Academy:
https://academy.guitarzoom.com/

Steve:

Hey, Steve Stine from the Guitar Zoom Academy. Here and today we're going to be talking about why guitar players wind up having a plateau and what we can do to try and break through that. So first thing we need to do is, as a guitar player, kind of define what that means to us. What is a plateau? Oftentimes, it means that we're playing, we're practicing regularly, but we're just not seeing the improvement that we'd like to. Now, why does this happen? Well, there's all sorts of different reasons. The first thing we're going to talk about is lack of structure. Okay, sometimes what happens is you know you, you've been learning random things, you know YouTube videos or whatever it might be, and you might, you know, connect with something, but in the bigger picture, you're really not. You're not making the progress that you want, and so you know, randomizing all of these different things. What I try and remind people to do is, if you really want to make forward motion with your playing, there's a few things that we can look at, but one of them is thinking about what your foundation is. What is it that you really want to try and achieve? Okay, and then being very careful of all of the other stuff, right? So let's take a very simple example. Let's say, for instance, your goal was to learn how to connect chords better. Okay, so you're trying to play. You know G and C and E, minor and D, or a bar chord or something like that, and you're struggling with elements of this. You're struggling with moving from G to the bar chord, or you're struggling with the bar chord itself, or C is difficult for you to play. So you already have ideas in your head of what needs to be done to be able to achieve this foundation of playing these chords and playing the song or songs that you want to be able to do. But you find yourself then practicing. You know tapping or something like that, or you're learning triads on your guitar or something. Now, again, I'm not saying that any of that is bad. It all has to do with how much time you have, whether or not these different kind of levels of study are completely disconnected or whether there's some sort of connection between them, and then whether or not you know you have enough availability in your brain in terms of space to be able to do all of these different things.

Steve:

Again, if you're practicing and you're loving what you're doing and everything's feeling good, who am I to say that you're doing anything right or wrong? If it's working for you, that's great. The reason why you're probably who am I to say that you're doing anything right or wrong? If it's working for you, that's great. The reason why you're probably hearing this right now is because maybe things aren't great, maybe you are kind of lost and you're not really sure what to do and you do feel like you're on a plateau and you're not really getting anywhere. That's where the problem is, you see. So you have to be a little bit careful with how much stuff you're trying to do and whether or not the things that you're trying to do are connected in some way that can benefit each other.

Steve:

So if you're trying to learn how to play these chords and then all of a sudden, you're working on Eddie Van Halen tapping, it might be motivating for you, but hopefully you can understand that there's a vast disconnect between what's happening with your chords and your strumming and all that kind of stuff and the fact that you're trying to learn how to tap. Oftentimes this happens too because there's such a disconnect in your ability at that point, if I'm talking to somebody who's been playing guitar for two months or three months and all of a sudden our conversation goes to you know string tapping or something like that. They might not be technically ready for that. Not only you know, mentally ready for whatever that is. They don't know scales. None of this is going to make sense. The technique or the art of the actual tap isn't something that they've developed yet. They're still trying to learn how to strum. So Just think about that a little bit.

Steve:

So common causes of plateau one is the lack of structure. We're all over the place. The next thing is ineffective repetition. We practice the same things over and over and over, but we're not really paying attention to the specifics and the struggles that we're having and how to improve those. So we're going through the motion, but we're not really paying attention to the detail.

Steve:

So let's say you were practicing a riff of some sort, some song that you like, okay, and you're working through it. But you know, think about what goes into that. There's the visualization and the memorization of what you're trying to do, and then there's the execution of what you're trying to do, the picking, the action of the pick, whether it's down picking, alternate picking, changing strings, whatever it might be, and then there's the fingers needed to be able to play the riff. And then there's timing, right, there's tone, there's all of these different kinds of things, there's dynamics. So you know, sometimes we just see the obvious. Okay, here's this riff and you know it goes two, four, five or something like that. Okay, so we memorize that, we've got that down, but then we need to work on the execution and then we need to work on the quality of what we're doing as well.

Steve:

So learning how to kind of deep dive into it with a focused mind so this is something else that I try and get people understand too is when you do practice, practice with intention and practice with focus. You know, don't just haphazardly practice with the TV on and the phones ringing and you know you're making something to eat and then you've got an extra five minutes to try and fit in there while you're watching the news. If it's something that's automated, that you you know again a practice element that you're just doing a warmup of some sort that doesn't require all that thought, hey, that's great. But if right now, what you need to do is be practicing something to try and develop it to, you know, get out of this plateau that you feel like you're on you need to focus. You know it's not always about how much time you spend, although that again, the balance of how much brain space you have available versus how much time you have and how many things you're going to attack. That's kind of the main section there. But even if you only had five or 10 minutes, you could still make progress by really learning how to focus on whatever it is that you're trying to develop.

Steve:

The other problem I see is that oftentimes there's no feedback, so you don't know whether or not what you're doing is working right. Or you need someone to tell you hey, you're missing this. Or if you tried this a little bit differently, it might be easier for you. Or as I'm watching you play, I'm seeing that you know your arm is bent this way and maybe, if you try to do this, or you know, as I watch you play that riff, I'm seeing that you're down picking, you're struggling with your down picking, or whatever it might be. So assessment is really important. When you don't have any feedback, it's hard to know whether what you're doing is actually working for you. Okay, and the other thing I would mention too is the comfort zone trap. Okay, you keep playing what you're already good at Okay. So you're not really trying to expand the palette, you're just you're just staying in that comfort zone.

Steve:

And I find this a lot when it comes to scales, for instance. You know, maybe the pentatonic, and again, the pentatonic is an amazing scale and there's a million things we can do with it. But sometimes what happens is somebody develops, you know, the first position of the pentatonic scale, or a couple of positions, and then that's it, or they memorize the notes on their sixth string, but then they never bothered to memorize any other notes. You find that kind of halfway point where you've learned something that's kind of useful and or very useful for that matter, but then you're not really wanting to expand that because you've already felt what it's like to actually have to spend the time to develop that. So, if that kind of makes sense, that's what we do.

Steve:

Now, how do we break through this? Well, there's a couple of different things we can do. Number one we can define a clear outcome, for instance a goal I want to be able to whatever. Now, oftentimes I hear people say you know, I just want to get better at guitar, I want to be a holistic guitar player, and again, there's nothing wrong with that. For some people that works really well, but for other people it's easier to define something specific.

Steve:

I want to learn to play my songs faster, more accurately, um, you know, cleaner, whatever. Whatever we want to say about those things, but that's what I want to be able to do. I want to. I want to learn how to do that. Or I want to learn how to improvise melodically, so when I play it doesn't just sound like I'm playing through a scale. Or I want to develop more understanding of my fretboard, the scales, the chords, you know, arpeggios, all of those things that are happening on my fretboard. I want to learn to visualize those better and understand the theory behind them. There's a lot of different things. So the next thing is is developing a focused plan, okay, that works into this goal, developing a path, excuse me, or a roadmap, if you will, to try and develop into this goal or these goals that we have.

Steve:

The other thing I think that helps with a breakthrough is, as I said before, assessment, looking for someone to hold you accountable, looking for insight, those aha moments that you can have when you're actually talking to somebody. I've always told people if you want to get really good at darts or you want to get really good at pool, the easiest thing to do is, you know, go to a bowling alley and bowl with really good bowlers. Or, if you play pool, find some friends that are really good at pool and hang out with them and play with them. And you might not be certainly the best pool player right now, but you're going to learn a lot by hanging out with other pool players versus just, you know, reading a book on how to play pool or watching a video on how to play pool. Again, those can be very, very valuable, there's no doubt about it. But if you're actually hanging out with somebody and you can interact with them and you can ask them questions and they can respond, and you go oh, I never thought about it that way, you can get a lot. There's a lot of aha moments that can happen from that. Okay, and just you know, bottom line, stay open to change.

Steve:

Okay, plateaus often mean it's time for you to evolve in your practice. If you start feeling like things are kind of stuck, you have to reflect and see what you're doing, see what you need. Again, think about your foundation. Trim the fat if you need, because, again, the foundation versus all this other stuff out here, is dependent on how much time you have to practice. You know, again, if you have 10 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes, you might not have time for all these other things. But overall, the more you can make these things and this fit together, the more progress you can make.

Steve:

Certainly, when you practice, make sure that you're focused and try and find, you know, some way of having communication. So just remember, if you know, we here at the Guitar Zoom Academy that's what this whole thing is about is building you a game plan, a roadmap, so you understand a practice routine of what it is that you're supposed to be working on, weekly assessments of your playing and then just being available, you know, literally on a daily basis, to be able to have conversations with you, to give you clarity and understanding and then get you right back to work. Bottom line is is that nothing happens unless you're working on it right. There's no magic pill here. You have to do the work.

Steve:

The difference is is if you don't know what to be doing, it can be a struggle, and the other part is is if you don't know how to get out of the mud, if you don't know how to get unstuck. That's where we get into a plateau and we get confused. So, being able to have conversations with people you know, you and I sit down and we actually talk about something and you tell me what's going on, or you show me what's going on, that's how we get you out of there. So, anyway, take care, stay positive and be sure to check out Guitar Zoom Academy. All right?

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