Hi, my name is Faizan Qaiser and I have been playing the guitar for around 13 years. I am here to advise you on how you can play in the most efficient manner. Here are a few things that I wished I knew when I was starting and what I consider essential for my personal improvement as a guitarist.
Personal Feedback
If you think after a lot of hard work your playing is finally amazing then congratulations, you won’t make any more improvements. Having the capacity to identify the quality of your playing does not guarantee improvements but it allows it. Criticizing your playing can be difficult even if you were sincerely trying. It requires training your ears to be able to identify good playing from bad. The first step to doing that is putting yourself in the shoes of the listener. Understand that a listener cannot appreciate the amount of practice you put in the performance, cannot identify the difficulty of a piece by looking at your hands, he is only concerned with whether the sounds you are making are pleasant or not. The second step is understanding the difference between a professional and a beginner is not the vocabulary of pieces that they can or cannot play, it’s the quality of their playing. One of the best ways to understand what cleanliness in playing is is to learn the songs of your guitar heroes and compare your recordings with theirs. Try to identify what causes the difference in the recordings. And trust me when I say it’s not just in the equipment.
Understanding the skill tree of a guitarist. (Progression is not always linear)
If you understand the difference between being an electric guitarist and an acoustic guitarist then you are already familiar with the concept I am trying to point out here. You do not begin as an acoustic guitarist and then level up to an electric guitarist. These are two different skill sets although they have some skills in common but spending time practicing one does not mean you have gotten better at the other one. The same can be applied to different kinds of electric guitarists. Being able to shred heavy metal licks all over the fretboard does not imply that you can play over a jazz progression. Even though to a layman the solos of a jazz guitarist can very easily look like shredding, they are just fundamentally different. They consist of different patterns and based on different music theory concepts. Therefore, if you are trying to decide what kind of a guitarist you want to be you should take that decision very seriously because even after 10 years of trying to be a metal guitarist you will need to learn jazz from scratch if you wish to switch lanes. The same goes for almost every genre of music out there. Some guitarists can play multiple styles but don’t be fooled, that is because they spent years practicing each style.
Check out his YouTube channel here:
Tune In Pakistan 
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