What Kind of Musician Do You Want to Be?

“Good” is not one thing

Ask ten people what a good guitarist is and you will get ten different answers, all of them correct. Someone who can play fast and clean. Someone who writes songs people want to hear. Someone who can improvise over changes they have never seen. Someone who holds a band together from the back. Someone with time so good that a room feels different when they walk in. Someone who knows a lot. Someone who can do a little bit of everything.

These are the same instrument and almost entirely different jobs. The player with monstrous technique may freeze if you ask them to make something up. The songwriter with three chords may have written the thing everybody in the room actually wants to sing. Neither is a deficient version of the other. They practiced different things, on purpose or by accident, and got what they practiced.

Which means the question “how do I get good?” is unanswerable until you replace it with good at what. It is not a philosophical distinction. It changes what you should do tomorrow morning. If you want to write songs, an hour of scale patterns is an hour spent on the wrong axis. If you want to play in a wedding band, learning forty songs adequately beats learning four perfectly. If you want to improvise, the ear work you keep putting off is not optional, it is the entire discipline.

The seven axes

Whatever the goal, it is built out of the same seven components. Read each one and give yourself a number out of five. Be honest rather than generous, because the point of the exercise is to find the weak one.

Download the worksheet (PDF)one page, print and score it

• Technique. Can you control the instrument? Coordination, articulation, picking, fretting, dynamics, tone, speed, endurance. This is the axis everybody thinks of first and the one most likely to be overdeveloped relative to the rest, because it is the easiest to measure and therefore the most satisfying to practice.
• Ear. Can you hear it? Pitch, intervals, chords, melody, rhythm, harmony, transcribing, and hearing what you imagine. This is the axis most self-taught players are weakest on, because tabs and chord charts let you avoid it indefinitely, and it is the one that most changes what you are capable of.
• Theory. Do you understand it? Notes, intervals, harmony, rhythm, scales, chords, voice leading, form, functional relationships. Not academic knowledge. Working knowledge, of the kind that lets you decide something in five seconds that would otherwise take a week of trial and error.
• Rhythm. Can you feel and control time? Pulse, subdivision, groove, syncopation, swing, phrasing, accents, space, and locking in with other musicians. The quietest axis and the one other players judge fastest. Nobody has ever been asked to leave a band for playing too slowly.
• Repertoire. Do you know music? Songs, standards, riffs, progressions, styles, vocabulary, learning music by ear and by memory. Repertoire is where your ideas come from. A player with fifty songs in their hands has a vastly bigger set of things to reach for than a player with five, whatever their technique.
• Creativity. Can you make musical decisions? Improvising, composing, arranging, reharmonizing, developing ideas, experimenting. This is the axis people assume is innate. It is mostly a function of the others plus permission to make bad noises in private.
• Musicianship. Can you make it work in music? Listening to others, dynamics, phrasing, accompaniment, interaction, taste, restraint, adapting to the situation. Knowing what not to play. This is the one nobody practices deliberately and everybody notices the absence of.

These are not stages and there is no order to work through. Mix and match as suits you, or just pick the one that sounds most useful right now, start there, and move to the next when it stops being the thing holding you back. A direction beats a curriculum.

Now look at your seven numbers. The lowest one is your answer for the next few months. This is unglamorous advice and it is the single most reliable thing in this article, because improvement is much cheaper at the bottom of a scale than at the top. Moving a two to a four takes weeks. Moving a four to a five can take years. Most people spend their practice at the top of their strongest axis, because that is where practice feels good.

Your goal decides the weighting

The seven are not equally important to everyone. Find the description closest to what you actually want, and notice how different the practice is:

• You want to write songs. Theory and creativity carry it, with enough repertoire to know what has already been done. Technique matters far less than people assume. A great many beloved songs are inside the first four chords anyone learns.
• You want to improvise. Ear first, then theory, then repertoire, in that order. You cannot play a line you cannot hear, and you cannot hear a vocabulary you have never absorbed. Technique is helps make them better but not always the main point.
• You want to play with other people. Rhythm, repertoire and musicianship dominate, and the underrated skill is listening while you play. Bands do not replace the player who cannot shred. They replace the one who cannot hold time or does not know the tunes.
• You want to play the music you love, well. Technique and repertoire, supported by enough ear to fix yourself. Nothing wrong with this goal, and it is quietly the most common honest answer.
• You want to work as a musician. All seven, and depending on the what role, reading and reliability.

None of these is a better answer than the others. The only bad answer is the unexamined one, because an unexamined goal defaults to whatever practice is most comfortable, which is usually more technique.

Doing the assessment properly

1. Write down the musician you want to be, in one sentence.Not “good.” Something like “I want to sit in at the blues jam without panicking” or “I want to finish songs instead of starting them.” Specific enough that you could tell whether it happened.
2. Rate the seven axes out of five. Do it fast. Your first instinct is more accurate than the number you talk yourself into.
3. Circle the lowest. If two tie, pick the one you would rather not have picked. That reliably identifies the right one.
4. Turn it into one concrete weekly action.Not “improve my ear.” “Ten minutes of figuring out melodies by ear before I touch a tab.” The axis is the diagnosis; the action is the treatment.
5. Put a date three months out in your calendar and rate yourself again. Axes move slowly and invisibly, and without a before you will not believe the after.

Three months is the right interval. Long enough that the weak axis has genuinely moved, short enough that you have not spent a year on a goal you stopped wanting in February.

The trap on both ends

There are two failure modes and they look like opposites. The first is copying without understanding: years of learning songs note for note, ending with a large collection of memorised finger positions and no ability to make anything. The notes went into the hands and never into the head.

The second is understanding without playing. Knowing the modes, the substitutions and the theory of everything, and freezing when someone counts in a tune. Theory that never gets used is trivia.

The way through is the same in both directions, and it is the shortest useful summary of everything above: copying gives you the vocabulary, understanding teaches you how to speak, and creating is where you finally say something. Skipping the first leaves you with nothing to say it with. Stopping at the first leaves you quoting other people forever.

Practically, that means when you learn something, do not stop at the notes. Ask what key it is in, what the chords are doing, why that one bar sounds like it does. The habit takes an extra two minutes per song and is close to the whole difference between a player who has learned three hundred songs and a player who has learned from three hundred songs. There is more on this in learning a song by ear and in the practice tips handbook.

What changes once you have an answer

The practical payoff is that practice stops being a buffet. Instead of doing a bit of everything and hoping, you have a stated weak axis and a reason to spend time on it even though it is less fun than the thing you are already good at.

It also makes the rest of this site usable rather than overwhelming. If your weak axis is ear, finding the key by ear and drone practice are your pages. If it is technique, slow practice is. If it is rhythm, metronome work and polyrhythms are. If it is repertoire, the question becomes what to actually go and learn, which is its own problem with a surprisingly good established answer: how to choose what to learn next.

And if the honest answer is that you do not know yet, that is fine and extremely common. Pick the goal that sounds most fun, commit for three months, and let the work tell you. Direction beats certainty. You will learn more about what you want from three months of pointed practice than from any amount of deciding in the abstract.

The summary

You cannot get good at “music” because it is not a single skill. You can get good at technique, ear, theory, rhythm, repertoire, creativity or musicianship, and the mix you choose is what people will eventually call your playing. Decide roughly what you are aiming at, find the axis you have been quietly avoiding, and give it three months.

Then learn the rules, learn the language, and use it to say something of your own.