Thank You

They made this a judgement-free zone for a reason. It can be really difficult for a person to put themselves out there, especially for something that we are all so passionate about and strive to improve upon. The other fact is that we ALL started somewhere. NONE of us, not a single person in the history of mankind, ever picked up a guitar for the first time and was like “Oh shit, I’m a virtuoso! Check out this tasty solo.”, and then proceeded to play a tasty solo. It takes time and dedication; repetition and playing the same licks, riffs, and solos over and over and over until it sounds exactly the way you want it to and then forgetting it and playing something brand new and starting the process over again; it takes failure and mistakes so that we can decide how we DON’T want to sound and then learn from it. Above all, it takes a sense of adventure and learning to just have fun with it. Why else would we do it if we didn’t love it from the start and feel good about it? Sometimes you just have to forget about playing everything perfectly and just go for it and feel a sense of confidence(not that you should work towards what YOUR definition of perfect is, because you should). If you don’t think you can find the confidence, close your eyes and imagine yourself playing and performing EXACTLY how the perfect version of yourself would play and notice the feeling it gives you when imagine yourself absolutely killing it- THAT is your confidence. Hold onto that vision. Remember it forever. Some of our best playing happens when we just free ourselves of mental barriers and and just flow with it. Free yourself from the fear of being judged or from people seeing you not at your best, fear has no place in the world of music and it certainly has no place here. The only person that hangs onto our bad performances and mess-ups is ourselves. If someone doesn’t like a performance, they just tune it out and forget about it. They aren’t taking it personally.
We are ALL here to grow and lift each other up, let’s all just make sure we always keep that goal in mind and we will all reach levels we didn’t think possible.
Keep it up Rowan, you’re doing great!