The Fastest, Easiest Way To Improve Your Playing

I want to talk today about the fastest, easiest way to improve your playing and let me explain it by telling you a little story.

When I was learning to fly and handle an airplane, I just couldn’t understand how to master a crosswind landing. I had a good instructor and I was understanding him well, but I just could not get the knack of how to handle a 15 knot crosswind landing. I saw a video tape advertised in an aviation magazine that was titled “Crosswind Landings Made Easy”. I purchased the tape for $39.95 thinking it was very expensive but it turned out to be the cheapest flying investment I ever made.

They put a camera at both ends of the runway. This showed the exact angle the airplane needed to be in as it approached the runway. It showed perfectly how much aileron and rudder needed to be used to accomplish the task. I only had to see the tape one time to get the idea. I drove to the airport, flew my plane to another local airport where the wind was directly across the runway and proceeded to make six of the most perfect landings I’d ever made.

Since this time, I have been an avid fan of instructional videos because I could see what the instructor was trying to tell me. There’s no way I could sit at both ends of the runway and fly the plane at the same time to see what I needed to see. The video did that for me.

I went ahead and invested an additional $300 on a complete video flying course. The art of flying was suddenly mine. It was the videos that put everything together for me. This is what convinced me that learning to play steel could be an easier task with great video instruction. This is the spark that lit my fire for making instructional videos and your acceptance is what keeps the fire burning.

The advantages of videos are that you can play them over and over and you’ll “get” something new every time you see them. If there is something you don’t understand you can play a particular part over and over until you do understand it. Try asking an instructor the same thing over and over without suffering his wrath in one way or another

Not only you, but family members can also learn from a video and of course, at the end of a video’s usefulness to you, it still has value to someone else and you can get a portion of your money back or else, when you finish with the videos, you still have something tangible you can hold in your hand which has value like a fine book. But by far, the greatest thing about a video is if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture in color with sound has to be worth a million.

A good video can show you where to pick a string, how to pick a string, how to use vibrato and where to put the bar all at the same time rather than telling you how to apply each technique individually and then have you try to merge all these different elements into one fluid motion the way a book discussion would do.

As I said, the fastest, easiest way to improve your playing is by watching instructional videos. See mine at See mine at www.steelguitar.net/videos1.html

Larry Sasser called today and sounded good. Seems we’re both doing a lot better.

Bobbe Seymour

www.steelguitar.net
info@steelguitar.net
www.youtube.com/bobbeseymour

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