[QUESTION] How to improve my relationship with music?

As musicians, we all have a natural insecurity that never fully goes away, so you'll have to learn to deal with that.

When You feel the nerves start acting up and your subconscious started telling you, "You're gonna fuck this up, you're not ready." You need to stop, close your eyes, and take deep, slow breaths until you feel the nerves start to relax. Tell the insecure part of your subconscious that you are the one running the show, that you have a job to do, and that you don't have time for that bull shit. The more you do this, the better you will be able to recognize your insecurity and move past it. (I know this sounds a little far out, but it has work wonders for me)

I can relate to what you describe in your post really well. I had play for about ten years as well, when I suddenly realized I was the weakest guitar player in my little circle of music friends despite the fact that I had been playing longer than nearly all of them.

When I realized this, I had a decision to make. Option one was to give up and just focus on other things keeping a guitar around to play every now and then when I felt like it. Option two was to admit that I was not the player I wanted to be and start getting serious about learning the instrument.

I took option two and decided to relearn guitar is if I had never touched one in my life. I dedicate two hours a day to playing. The first hour I would spend actively practicing and the second I would just have fun. At first, I didn't know where to begin, so I would just go on YouTube and find a lesson on some technique or concept that I would work on before moving on to another random technique/concept.

I did this for about a year. The benefits came quickly at first as I had so much room to improve and I had, to this point, never really dedicated myself to an active practice approach. As time went on, though, I started to hit a major wall. I realized that a lack of progressive structure was making it impossible to build upon what I was learning. Sure, I had a grasp on a handful of different techniques, but they were just random tricks that had little to do with realistically playing music.

It was a little over a year ago that I went on google and typed "best guitar teachers in Tulsa." Among the institutes, schools, and academies that popped up was a single person's name. I didn't want to enroll in school, so I gave the man a call and scheduled a lesson.

The first thing he did was a skill assessment to gauge what I knew and didn't know. From there, he gave me something he called 'the chord formula' which was an expensive list of major, dominate, and minor chords with all their extensions and alterations broken down into intervals along with a little chord progression that included alterations and extensions like Gsus4's and D9's. He told me to memorize the chord formula to the point I could recite each interval of a given chord by the next lesson and play through the chord sheet.

Naturally, I spent more time working on playing the actual music than studying the theory stuff thinking that playing was more important that understanding. When the next lesson came along, I spent an hour or so warming up with the new chords I had learned to play and eagerly left to show him how much better I had gotten. When I got to the lesson the first thing he did was ask me the intervals of a dominate 9 chord. For the life of me, I could not recall if dominate was a 7 or b7. He asked about a maj7sus4. Reflexively, I replied, "1, 3, 5,..." and was quickly cut off.

Without even getting a chance to play the chords, he stopped the lesson and had a critical conversation about his expectations from his students. He told me if I showed up to another lesson this unprepared I might as well not bother showing up because there were people who wanted to take this more seriously.

This lit a fire under my ass and I immediately went home and made flash cards of every chord and their intervals. I took them to work with me and studied them whenever I had some down time. I spent a minimum of an hour each day working on physically playing my assignments and probably 2-3 hours learning the theory. I was over-prepared for the next lesson and received praise from the instructor that I had learned what kind of dedication was going to be needed in order to get where I wanted to be.

I have continued putting in this kind of work for about a year and I half, and the results are undeniable. I know we are not supposed to compare ourselves to other players, but its natural to do so. When I go and play with the same people I was playing with before I taking lessons, I'm running circles around them, I have gotten paying gigs with professional bands, but most importantly, I have an understanding of what is going on in the music and why it needs or doesn't need certain things.

Hopefully, I'm not just saying this to brag. Two and a half years of focused practicing, with one and a half of those being with the guidance of a professional instructor has made a world of difference for me. It sounds like a lot of time, and has come with it's fair share of stress, but I am now starting to see a realistic path to being able to make a living off music. This is something 3 years ago I thought was simply impossible. There is still a lot of work I have left to put in and loads of shit I need to improve on, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

If you want to become a serious player, unfortunately, there are not really any shortcuts. It took me essentially starting from scratch and forgetting everything I had learned in my ten year introduction to guitar to get to a point where I was excited about proud of my playing. You will have to put in a lot of work, but learning becomes fun when it is something you are passionate about. I could not recommend finding a good instructor enough. If not, at the minimum, I think you should signup for an online course or buy books with a targeted progression to make sure that what you are learning will translate logically to the next step.

Don't be embarrassed to tell people you are (re)learning guitar. I don't know why, but for the first several months, I tried to hide the fact that I was going to an instructor. Eventually, though, I started talking about it and everyone was super pumped, though maybe a little confused as to why. When people see you trying to get better at something, no matter what it is, they like it. For some reason, when you are the one doing it, that feels vulnerable, but remember, that's just your subconscious insecurities popping up again, and you're the one running the show.

/r/Guitar Thread