Repertoire.
Building your set list.
The soul-purpose of any musician is to never stop learning music. If you play your instrument for a long time, you will learn many songs. If you go beyond that, you will be unable to remember just how many songs you actually know how to play.
As a guitar/bass guitar instructor, my job is to teach the basics of proper practicing techniques, exercises, music theory, creative thinking, repetition and commitment. In all honesty, most of my students simply want to learn how to play songs on their guitar. Incorporating this desire with the basics of learning how to play the guitar, becomes a fine balance.
Reading music.
The idea behind learning any instrument is to be able to not only read music, but to be able to memorize as much of it as possible. Reading is priority one. I don't normally teach notation-reading, unless it is adamantly requested by the student or the parent of the student. In all honesty, as an instructor who focuses mostly on beginners and intermediate students, I rarely get any student who insists on learning notation. This is not to say that we don't go over it in the lessons. The basic music theory part of my lessons are all about understanding notation reading and applying it to the guitar.
Over the many years that I have been teaching, I have found one simple commonality amongst my students - most of them simply just want to learn how to play a few dozen chords, maybe a few scales for improvisation and melody, and play their favorite songs on their guitar. I figured long ago, a way to get my point across while at the same time, appeasing their desired goals in their lessons.
Chord chart reading.
If you play the guitar or the piano, you've got to know your chords. It's as simple as that. You've got to know every chord name, chord shape, chord sound, and chord extension. You've got to know the difference between chords that look similar. For example: C9 and Cadd9 are two very different chords. C7 and CΔ7 are also two very different chords.
Building your chord vocabulary.
How many words do you know? How many words can you correctly spell without the aid of the internet? Hundreds? A few thousand? Several thousand? It seems that the more words you know including their definitions, and correct spelling, the greater your intellect. If you have a large vocabulary, chances are, you can probably have a meaningful conversation with just about anybody.
Now, imagine using that same concept toward your chord vocabulary. How are you going to learn twenty, thirty, fifty, one-hundred, three-hundred-plus chords? Practice, practice and practice...and when you're done, practice some more.
You have to make a list of the songs you want to learn how to play. I'm not talking about a dozen songs. I'm talking about two or three hundred songs. The internet has endless websites filled with lists of beginner songs for guitar players. You don't have to recognize all of those songs. The idea is to start on one song that looks relatively easy - maybe one that has a few chords that you can actually play and change clearly in rhythm. Start off with easy songs.
No! It’s not true!
Here is one of my all-time favorite myths about learning to play songs: "I have to learn the song all the way through before I move onto another song." Nothing could be further from the truth! If you can play a few songs all the way through, great! If you can only play parts of songs because some of the chords are more difficult, great! If you can only play a few chords in a song, great! Keep moving onto the next song on your list.
Why is this important?
Look at it this way - if you start on a song, you get half way through and you decide that it's too difficult for you - go to the next song and come back to that first one later. Now, imagine doing this a thousand times. Eventually, you will learn every chord you will ever need to know, to play all of those songs just as easily as the one before it. Does this make any sense?
Once you have tried to play a few hundred songs, you will absolutely recognize common patterns in music - patterns that repeat, formulas with the same chord progressions, same tempos, same song structures, etc. Every song you will ever play on your instrument, comes from the remnants of many other songs. In order for you to experience this, you have to play all or parts of hundreds of songs.
Building a set list.
Have you ever gone out to a nightclub and listened to someone playing a live performance on a small stage? How many songs do you think that musician knows? Do you think he/she only knows the 30-40 songs they play for that one gig? Probably not. Most seasoned musicians who perform on a regular basis, have put in countless tens-of-thousands of hours into their craft at becoming a practicing musician. That means that person has probably learned thousands of songs over many, many years. Chances are, they can probably play most of them right off the top of their head.
Gigs.
Every venue is different. Every gig is different. Every audience is different. If one of these gigs is a "cover" night, that musician must be prepared to play cover songs that fit that gig. This is why they make set lists. A prepared list of songs that are favorites or commonly requested covers for the hundreds of other audiences he/she has ever played for. If you play a gig at a beach bar adorned with a Tiki theme, you might want to brush up on your Jimmy Buffett catalogue. If you play a country gig, you might want to learn the latest country songs. The more songs, the more genres you know,the greater your chances of getting more paid gigs.
Practicing your set list.
Let's say that you have been practicing around thirty songs, and you know all of them pretty well. Let's say that you can even sing with these songs, but something's missing. It feels unorganized. There doesn't seem to be any sort of rhyme or reason to the songs. This is when you put together your own set list.
Each set should be around 40-50 minutes. That's around ten or eleven songs per list. You make a list and you play exactly what is on that list - nothing less, nothing more. You play each song in the order you have made the list. You go from one song to the next song with about ten seconds between each song to get a drink, check a text, adjust your chair, whatever. Get into the habit of making your daily practice session an actual performance - even if it's you all by yourself in your own living room. Play your guitar like you are playing a gig. Get used to doing this as a ritual. Once you have done this list, make another list, then another, then another.
The best, fastest, easiest way to get better on your guitar is to practice a list of songs. In doing so, you will increase your chord vocabulary while decreasing your performance anxiety. Learn what it means to have the confidence of a musician and a set list of songs that will make you a walking jukebox.