Straight to the Riff …

Most youngsters do it - I did it - it certainly seems like the smart thing to do. Commonly, when someone decides they want to learn how to play the guitar - they look to the current ‘legend’ and just start copying what he  or she is doing … they forget about learning the chords and the basics of building a melody - and just start mimicking the legends favourite ‘riff’. By rote.

Cutting straight to the ‘riff’ seems like it’ll just save us time - but in the end , it won’t. Instead of modelling what the aforementioned legend’ is doing now, it makes far more sense to model the path he took to get there. 

I’ve seen this happen, on a very large scale, with boxing, and with BJJ. Cutting straight to the ‘riff’ without learning the building blocks to fully understand how or even ‘why’ - we are doing what we’re doing.

A part of the coaches job - is to walk their students through the evolution of a thing - to shed light on what we are doing, why we are doing it - and as well, of course, how we are doing it. The process of development is as important as the final product. The heroes all walked the walk … the wannabees try jumping straight to the ‘riff’.