The Five-Phase Journey to Becoming a Confident Guitarist

What really holds most guitar players back? After teaching thousands of guitarists, I've discovered it's rarely about technical ability—it's about confidence. That feeling of certainty when you play, knowing who you are as a musician, and being comfortable in your own skin.

The journey to guitar confidence follows five distinct phases, each building upon the last. It begins with curiosity—that moment when you hear Hendrix, Van Halen, or whoever your inspiration might be, and think "I want to do that!" This natural motivation fuels your early development. Next comes foundation building, where you develop the essential skills needed for your musical goals. This is where many players get distracted by "bright shiny objects" instead of focusing on the fundamentals that will truly advance their playing.

The third phase—developing actual confidence—is where most guitarists get stuck. It requires something scary: being vulnerable enough to play for others and receive feedback. "I'll play with people once I'm better" becomes a perpetual excuse, creating a cycle where improvement stalls because you're not getting the feedback needed to grow. Breaking through this barrier transforms your playing.

Once confidence develops, you enter the creative expression phase, where your playing begins to sound more human and personal. This naturally evolves into the final phase—musical identity. The liberating truth is that even guitar legends have limitations. Tommy Emanuel doesn't play like Eddie Van Halen, and Joe Bonamassa doesn't sound like Steve Vai. These players succeeded not by mastering everything, but by embracing who they are musically.

The guitar truly is Pandora's box—endless possibilities that will outlive us all. Don't let that overwhelm you. Finding your center and developing confidence in your unique voice is the real path to becoming the guitarist you want to be. Where are you in these five phases, and what's your next step toward confident playing?

Links:

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

• Steve’s Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/stinemus...
• GuitarZoom Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarz0...
• Songs Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarSo... .

Chapters

• 1:10 Introduction to Guitar Confidence
• 2:05 Phase One: Curiosity
• 3:20 Phase Two: Foundation Building
• 4:45 Phase Three: Developing Confidence
• 7:53 Phase Four: Creative Expression
• 10:20 Phase Five: Musical Identity
• 10:54 Guitar Zoom Academy Invitation

Transcript

Steve: 0:35

Hey Steve Stine from Guitar Zoom Academy here. Thank you so much for joining me. Today we're going to be talking about the five phases of becoming a confident guitar player. Not necessarily just a guitar player that practices a lot of things, but a guitar player that feels good about themselves and feels confident. And oftentimes what I find is when I talk to people is that there's just a lot of lack of confidence in their playing, and so you know they'll start off conversations with me like, well, you know, I never want to. This isn't about playing on stage, or it's not about playing with other people, or. And then, as you dive deeper into the conversation, oftentimes the reason why they're saying these things is because they don't feel confident with themselves, and I totally understand that. So let's just talk about some five phases of becoming a confident guitar player.

Steve: 1:30

So phase one for me, starts with curiosity. You're watching a video, or you know you go to a concert or you hear a song or whatever, and you're like, oh man, I really want to do that, I really want to learn that, I want to be able to play that, and for a lot of us, oftentimes that starts in our youth, where maybe you bought an album, if you know what an album is, of course, or whatever. You heard a song on the radio and you're like, oh my god, that's the greatest thing ever. And, of course, for me this all started with. I mean a lot of different bands ACDC and Jimi Hendrix, hendrix and Rush and Led Zeppelin and all these things but the big one that struck me was Kiss, when I was a little kid and I went, oh my god, I want to be able to do that. So it started with this curiosity of of interest. Right, instead of wanting football or wanting, you know, I don't know, whatever might be, the guitar became the focus in my brain and I went man, that's what I want to really be able to do. Further along, you might already be playing, and that same thing can happen. You're learning how to do stuff and you watch a video, or you hear a song, or you go to a concert or whatever it might be, and you go oh my God, that sounds great, I want to know what's going on there. So that curiosity is really important and you know, a natural thing that we want to be able to feel, it's a motivational thing.

Steve: 2:45

So the next thing for us, phase two, for me is foundation. So now we have to start learning the essentials, the tools needed to be able to do whatever it is that we're talking about, and sometimes these can be out of place, like we might get that inspiration. Now I'm watching Eddie Van Halen and I'm like, oh, I want to be able to do that, but I don't play guitar yet. So there's going to be work involved, from getting from point A to point B to point C and so on. But developing these tools, knowing what it is that we need to be able to accomplish these goals, that we have right, the foundation, which I always think about it like this this is your foundation, this is your who you want to become, and underneath here are all the tools that you need, and out here are all the things that are really really, really cool, bright and shiny objects. But we don't need those yet. What we need are these to get going. We need these to develop that goal. So developing and understanding the foundation, which often will attribute to what your practice routine is going to look like. Okay, so if I hear a song, I hear you know, I don't know shock me by kiss and I'm like, oh my God, I really want to learn how to play that. Okay. So it starts with this curiosity, but then the next thing is is I need to start deep diving into it and figure out what it is that I need and how to develop these things right. That can be really difficult to do on your own, of course, but that's that's how this whole thing works.

Steve: 4:08

The next thing for me, phase three, is confidence. Okay, so, playing with other people, playing in front of other people, right, jamming with backing tracks, um, corresponding back and forth, maybe you make videos and you you post those for for um other people to see. You ask questions and you play in front of people, right? I call that assessment, of course, is where you know you. I say to you hey, play that for me, let me see what it is that you're doing and let me let me give you some insight on that, and the insight isn't negative. The insight is here's what is happening and here's what I think you need to work on a little bit more, to try and get that a little more where you want it to be. You need to focus on this thing a little bit more, of this thing a little bit more, which feeds your foundation, it feeds your practice, you see.

Steve: 4:56

So, coming out of your shell and being okay with the fact that you because here's the problem, let's just kind of deal with this right now People will keep saying, well, I don't want to do this until I'm better at this. Or, you know, I really want to be able to play with people, but I need to learn this, this and this and this first, and then time keeps going and they're not doing this and this and this and this, which leads to not ever doing the playing with other people stuff. So at some point you've got to find a way of exposing yourself, your inadequacies of playing guitar and being okay with it. I need help. What is it that I need to do to fix the problems that I have in my guitar playing? And the answer is I need to hear you play. I need to see you play to be able to fix these things. You have to be confident enough to play in front of me for me to be able to hear you and make an assessment and give you some insight so you can go back and start building that foundation.

Steve: 6:01

Okay, now it might not be publicly posting it on YouTube, right, that might be a bit much, but it might be something a little bit smaller, where you're doing it in a community of like-minded people that are also trying to do the same thing. Very encouraging, right? This isn't a competitive kind of environment. This is something where we're all trying to help each other, so developing that confidence. Once you develop this confidence, you start recognizing the things that you can do and the things that you can't do, which, believe it or not, even the most your favorite guitar players on the planet cannot do everything, and that's just the truth, and I apologize if that is a shocker to you, but it's true. If you take Tommy Emanuel, who's an amazing, my favorite acoustic guitar player on the planet, okay, Love the guy to death. He doesn't play anything like Eddie Van Halen. He doesn't play anything like Steve Vai and Steve Vai is an amazing guitar player, one of my favorite guitar players, but he doesn't play anything like Tommy Emanuel, and neither one of them play anything like Joe Bonamassa and again, insert names here. They're all incredibly good at what they do, but they cannot do everything, and they certainly can't do it to the capacity of each other.

Steve: 7:18

So what we have to do is get over this thing that we're supposed to be good at every single thing on the planet when it comes to guitar playing, because that's impossible. What we do is find our goals, find our interests, and we start developing and building to that and maybe somewhere along the lane, somewhere along the line, excuse me our interests change a little bit. Okay, well, that's fine. So we're going to shift over here. Hey, I started playing rock and now I'm interested in jazz. I started playing jazz and now I'm interested in country, started playing country and I'm interested in acoustic playing or God knows what it is.

Steve: 7:51

It could be anything and we can certainly do multiple things. I'm just saying they're all different players and so for you to develop that confidence, you start figuring out who you are and where you want to go and you start developing those things. So Joe Bonamassa, for instance, doesn't wake up every single day and hate his playing and just want to be Steve Vai because he wouldn't be Joe Bonamassa. Then he knows who he is and he knows what he does and he's going to keep working at getting better for the rest of his life, I am sure, just like we do. But that's what's missing for a lot of people is that they don't know who they are and they don't. They're trying to be everything to everybody and the goal is is you got to figure this out, like, who are you? Who do you want to be? How do we get there? And then, if we need to be other people a little bit, there are shortcuts that we can take to be able to fill out those as well.

Steve: 8:47

Or, if you have lots of time to practice, maybe you can look at a couple of different things, just being honest and I'm just being real about it. Okay, things I'm just being honest and I'm just being real about it. Okay, it's just. There's so much the guitar is. I always tell people it's like a Pandora's box. When you open it, it's endless. The guitar will outlive all of us because there's so many things that you could do and if you let that overwhelm you, you're never going to get anywhere and you're certainly not going to develop that confidence.

Steve: 9:14

Okay, once you've got that confidence, then you can start working on creative expression. Now that you feel good about yourself and you've got this thing working for you, you've got a center to your guitar playing, you can start trying to work on the creativity of what you're doing and how it sounds. And again, that's where this human thing comes in and all of a sudden, what you're doing begins to sound more real, both to you and to your listener. In that you develop the fifth phase. Fourth phase was creative expression.

Steve: 9:41

Fifth phase, to me, is identity. So as you start getting into this creative expression, you start moving into this new realm which is identity, this personal way that you approach things and people get used to hearing that. We can call that your musical voice, if you will. So that's to me how this whole thing works here at the Guitar Zoom Academy. That's the goal is for us to help you understand what those things are for you and how to achieve those things, how to work together to get you to those places. So you develop a foundation, you develop that confidence.

Steve: 10:19

Once you've got that, then we start working on creative expression. How do you do these things? So you are the end result. That's your identity. Right, that's what we try and work on here in the Academy, and if that sounds like something that you might be interested in, please do me a favor check out Guitar Zoom Academy and talk to one of us and we'll see whether or not the Academy would be a good fit for you. So take care, stay positive, keep practicing and I'll talk to you soon, okay.