this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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What songs helped you break through a playing plateau? (lemmy.org)
submitted 19 hours ago by alex_riv@lemmy.org to c/guitars@lemmy.world
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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 โ€” 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 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.

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[โ€“] korthrun@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

There was a point where I felt I was a pretty solid player generally, but I ended up asking myself "How can you have been playing all these years and still not play any shreddy solos?". I committed to learning the Crazy Train solo with a similar mindset of just trying something that was out of my current skill level. Super fun, and 100% a skill up situation.

Earlier on, learning 'Romance' was a big skill jump for sure, if you're into classical guitar at all.

Picking up some AC/DC songs was pretty great too. At that point I was an avid blues listener but not player, as I had picked up guitar mostly to play metal. AC/DC did well to bridge the gap between harder music and its roots in blues.

Speaking of metal, just pick a Pantera song. There's a good chance that Dime will have you doing new things.

Blackbird was a great call out. I find that a lot of Beatles jams are more complex to play than they sound, so I'll also promote more of that. There's a complete scores book that's pretty solid, it's a bit pricey but also not hard to find in PDF format.