Originally Posted by mr dave

hmmm blues and classic rock, the starting points for SO MANY guitarists (i still have all my Hendrix tab books hehe). how long have you been playing? what are the 'toughest' songs you've learned so far?

unfortunately getting bored and burning out are legitimate concerns when it comes to playing guitar, especially early on if you're the kind of person who gets a feeling of success from learning something unique rather than a new way of using old pieces. for example, when i was first learning my uncle hooked me up with a chord book and told me to go home and learned the dozen or so shapes he had circled throughout (open majors and minors). a week later i went back he got me to strum through the chords then thoroughly disappointed me when he smiled back and said i was done, that was all i needed to know. i remember wondering how it could be possible. he was right though, all i 'needed' to learn were the chord shapes, after that it was up to me to find ways to use them.

when you mention picking up a piece of sheet music and playing along... do you know how to read tablature yet? it's a form of musical transcription that lends itself incredibly well to the guitar. it's also incredibly easy to find online and in music stores. there's no reason you should be running out of a variety of material to play along with.

as for sounding good, there's nothing that replaces practice. though it doesn't need to feel like 'practicing'. i hardly ever specifically practiced anything, i played a whole hell of a lot to anything within my range though. it made it significantly more fun to build up my chops that way. sure i might not have practiced 'that' full scale frontwards and backwards 99 times everyday for months but who cares? i can still pull it out for 'that' solo in 'that' song.

as for reading vs. playing by ear. there are pros and cons to each. a balanced approach would be best, if not, personally, i'd take the person who can play by ear over the reader. in my experience people who learn entirely from reading have a really hard time playing anything that isn't written down first, which makes for spontaneous bursts of awesome pretty much impossible. the vast majority of musicians i know can't read actual music.

going back to your teacher, this goes back to your personal goals and what you're communicating back to him. there's a difference between wanting to learn to play guitar so you can play along to a bunch of favourites and learning to play guitar so you can write out a new batch of classics. it sounds like your teacher is assuming the latter. there's nothing really wrong with it but in car terms if all you want to do is go fast all you need to know how to do is put the car in gear, hold the wheel straight and floor it... on the other hand your teacher is explaining how the gasoline gets to the engine and is compressed by the pistons prior to being combusted by the sparkplug and delivering power to the engine and yadda yadda yadda.

if all you want to do is learn to rock out bring in specific tunes you want to learn and tell him to help you learn those songs - you're the one paying for these sessions after all.