Practice Practice Practice!
I had a troubling guitar practice session last night. It felt like I didn’t have timing and I couldn’t hit any chords correctly. There was a lot of buzzing towards the end of the night. I kept muting a string on a chord. It was very frustrating.
I have to keep reminding myself that it takes a lot of time to get good at something. I’m trying to relate learning kata to learning the guitar. I need to see the chords, strumming and fretting as the fundamentals, equivalent to punches, kicks, stances and blocks. Practice them individually and in basic kata (the songs I currently have) repeatedly.
Just as my stances could get more stable, my strikes speedier and more focused, I have to work on positioning my fingers on the fret board correctly from the start (I’m fumbling and having to correct my placement). Same thing with strumming. I need to be consistent and always strike the strings on down and up strokes. Just as the focus of power is in the hips, I need to relate that to my wrist (not the elbow) for guitar.
Every kata, even basic ones like Taikyoku, have a tempo to them, a rhythm. It took months of practice to get the timing down, even on my favorite kata like wanshu and annan. I have to see guitar playing the same way.
And even when I did get pretty good at all my kata, I still had a lot more room to improve. And that was seven years of training. I’ve only been practicing the guitar for a few weeks, just about a month.
