What songs helped you break through a playing plateau?

https://lemmy.org/post/4847214

What songs helped you break through a playing plateau? - Lemmy.org

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 [https://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.

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.