I’ve been playing for about 3 years and hit a wall recently. Felt like I was just cycling through the same songs and chord shapes.
What finally helped was deliberately picking songs slightly above my comfort zone — stuff with unexpected chord changes or rhythms I hadn’t tried before. For me it was “Blackbird” (the fingerpicking pattern forced me to think differently) and “Jolene” (that tempo is deceptively tricky).
I’ve been using chordroom.com lately to browse through songs by difficulty and it’s been solid for finding charts that are actually readable. Their library is massive (260k+ songs) and it’s free without the paywall nonsense.
What songs pushed you to the next level? Always looking for new challenges.
You must log in or register to comment.
The song that made me unlock new techniques while I was only playing acoustic was “Che Rumore Fa La Felicità” (link): it forced me to learn to play percussion while finger picking and it’s a thing I keep doing years later, even if I play rhythm on an electric (finger picking + percussion on a Telecaster middle position is among my favourite guitar tones).
If we’re talking about music theory instead, playing on a ukulele will force you to own your triads positions and escape the CAGED system (pun intended).
Always something very challenging. Not something beyond comprehension, but a song that I can pick away at. I don’t often push myself, but when I do, the results are obvious.
Anyway, Eugene’s trick bag was a big one for me. It’s not a song, per say, just a (Steve Vai) solo used to defeat the devil in an eighties movie.
Glass Prison has some similar arpeggio shapes.
Trying out different genres of music is also eye opening. I can play basic to advanced rock stuff easily. A little jazz or classical and my brain melts. To that end “las abejas” and “fly me to the moon” were like learning a foreign language. I don’t particularly like the latter, but it definitely showed me just how little I know.
Best of luck. Keep pushing yourself.
There was a point where I felt I was a pretty solid player generally, but I ended up asking myself “How can you have been playing all these years and still not play any shreddy solos?”. I committed to learning the Crazy Train solo with a similar mindset of just trying something that was out of my current skill level. Super fun, and 100% a skill up situation.
Earlier on, learning ‘Romance’ was a big skill jump for sure, if you’re into classical guitar at all.
Picking up some AC/DC songs was pretty great too. At that point I was an avid blues listener but not player, as I had picked up guitar mostly to play metal. AC/DC did well to bridge the gap between harder music and its roots in blues.
Speaking of metal, just pick a Pantera song. There’s a good chance that Dime will have you doing new things.
Blackbird was a great call out. I find that a lot of Beatles jams are more complex to play than they sound, so I’ll also promote more of that. There’s a complete scores book that’s pretty solid, it’s a bit pricey but also not hard to find in PDF format.
deleted by creator
Meh… the library is pretty limited and the site UX isn’t that great. I’ll give it another go on the weekend.
I think at three years in you should either get a loop pedal and challenge yourself that way or join a band. Ain’t nothing like crafting a song to sharpen the skills!
Big plateau breaker for me was behind the screams by cky. I’d never actually listened to the band, but an ex girlfriend had begged me to learn it for her, and I thought it was funny to play it after we split. Then it was delerium trigger by coheed, and most recently, sarcophogi by the mars Volta.
