I am in the same boat as you. I have an attention span problem and it can definitely affect my focus, concentration and improvement. But let me give you some advice that helped me.
Allow yourself to ‘space off’. There is no one in this world that can focus on something for 5 hours at a time. I use to think I had to spend at least five hours of nonstop playing in order to be any good. And then I watched Syn live not that long ago in Wichita, KS and saw there was a decent chunk of at least a few minutes or even five minutes before he’d go into the next song. Shadz would talk, I’m sure his guitar would be getting tuned, he’d have something else going on. When you have a band rehearsal, you actually engage with other bandmates and you never sit there and play for 5 hours straight working on something. It gives you a mental break. So, there’s something else to break your mind away from the monotony that practicing can have.
Also, there can be the sense of being overwhelmed that makes me not able to focus. There’s so much to any craft or skill you have to learn, and it can become overwhelming; making your mind shut down and wanting to move on to other things. Because of this, I have allowed myself to be ok with practicing ONE scale over and over again for almost 10 minutes at a time at the same BPM, and magic can actually really happen. I’ll play it about five times, rest and stretch, do it again, rest and stretch, and next thing I know I’m noticing things like “Oh, my pink-to-ring finger coordination is terrible, I should work on that. My pinky strength is weak, maybe that’s why I’m struggling. My hand-to-hand coordination is off, I should focus on this.” It makes you aware of things to focus on other than just mindlessly playing a scale (or anything) and becoming bored or overwhelmed. By taking things slow and deliberate, I have found myself improving more and more than bombarding myself with a million things to do. It may help to think “If I just play this one thing at 80BPMs and do it for ten minutes a day, I can increase the BPM by 1 everyday and by month 6 I’d be at like super master shredder level.”
Another thing, it’s a GREAT thing to hone in on your flaws. You want to do that, so you know you have them and can improve on them. This is why Synyster Gates will always be my number one guitar idol; he’s human, and he knows it. I have watched several videos of him and he’ll make faces like “oh shit that was out of key” or even “Woops, oh no, the camera picked up that wrong note” (Papa Gates is tied but I never hear him make any mistakes, and if he does, he does a damn good job at hiding it). Please be humble, ALWAYS be humble, and stay humble. The fact that you notice mistakes is a great thing. The only reason I got any good was because I checked my ego at the door. There’s nothing worse than playing with someone who thinks they “know it all” and never mess up.
Another word of encouragement, and this is going to get pretty deep but I’m trying to share my own advice I’ve gained from similar situations.
I’ve played guitar for 20 years. But it wasn’t until a few months ago that the shocking fact of life sucking made me take it seriously. I had been a victim of sexual assault, lied to, used, and stolen from all sorts of people I thought I could trust. My life turned right-the-fuck-upside-down. All of my last 15 years of living I had realized I spent living for everyone else, and when I shut the door on them, the only person I had was my best friend (who is also my singer). I lost a whole lot of people in my life and the terrible realization of how used I had been, and yet forgotten, was more than I could bear. With this in mind, I shut out the world and literally sold my soul to my guitar. It became my boyfriend, my therapist, my escape. I use to be super hard on myself with my guitar as well, but that had been stemmed from everyone in my life calling me useless and telling me I wasn’t serious about anything. But I let all those people go. I allowed (for once in my life) myself to suck. I allowed myself the freedom to be terrible. And it was okay, because that was MY coping time. I was doing something I loved. In my anger I’d hit the strings as hard as I could. In my sadness I’d learn a song or write a song that expressed my emotions. My guitar was officially the only thing I could rely on as being stable and true.
You may be asking how this story relates to you. Lose yourself in your guitar. Suck at it. Be fucking terrible at it. Sing off-key to it. Let it out. Be so awful at it that no one would want to hear you. Because it doesn’t matter. They don’t matter. You do. You’re only doing this to please yourself and make yourself happy. Every single legend of music was so shitty at one point that people made fun of them. Look up videos of Avenged Sevenfold’s first shows and the comments are hilarious There are a LOT of cringe-worthy moments in there. But look who they are today. So many people made fun of them and still do. But they are legends, whether people like it or not. And they are FUCKING incredible, whether haters loathe them or not. As long as you recognize your mistakes and become comfortable with fixing them, you will never be worthless on guitar. Even if you write songs with only 4 chords throughout the whole thing that repeat. Some of the most iconic songs in history were written with only four chords.
Don’t be down on yourself. Allow yourself to be flawed and falter. Syn did
