A metal producer quit guitar for 8 years. His comeback method is what most of us are missing.

In high school, all I wanted to do was play guitar. I was never in a real band. Had a couple of friends I jammed with. But music was the thing. It was all I thought about, all I wanted to be and do.

Then life happened and music stopped. Not a dramatic exit. I didn't put the guitar down in some defining moment. I just played a little less, then a little less, and then not at all. For nearly twenty years.

So when I watched Eyal Levi's video "Why I Quit Guitar," it hit close to home. Levi is the guitarist and co-founder of Daath, a metal producer who's worked with Chelsea Grin and Machine Head, and the guy behind URM Academy and Riffhard. I've been a URM member for about a year and a half, so this isn't some random video that popped up in my feed. This is someone who I've been learning from for a while.

Levi's gap was eight years. Mine was closer to twenty. But the feeling he describes, playing less and less until less became nothing, I know exactly what that is.

The comeback nobody plans for

When Levi picked the guitar back up, he didn't just noodle around and hope for the best. He treated it like athletic training. Structured schedules. Tempo ranges. A color-coded spreadsheet.

A very detailed spreadsheet.

He built a system where he tracked his tempo on specific exercises with a color code. Red meant the tempo was too fast, he might be hurting himself. Yellow meant caution, stay there. Orange meant he could try pushing up. Green meant comfortable. The spreadsheet told him whether to bump up the tempo, hold steady, or back off.

That blows my mind, because I have nothing like that. I've been playing again for about eight years now. I have probably a few hundred courses from different teachers across who knows how many sites. And I'm all over the place. No tracking, no system. Just going on feel.

I think that's a big reason why I haven't made the progress I feel like I should have.

If it's not on Strava, it didn't happen

Levi says something in the video that stuck with me: if he's not tracking progress, he feels like he didn't even do the work.

I run marathons and ultra marathons, and there's a saying in that world: if it's not on Strava, it didn't happen. Or if it's not on Garmin, it didn't happen. That's how ingrained tracking is in the culture of running and physical self-improvement. Nobody goes out and runs ten miles and then just guesses whether they're getting faster. You look at the data. You compare this week to last week. You know.

Music practice has nothing like that. Most of us sit down, play for an hour, and our only feedback is "that felt pretty good" or "that was rough." No data. No comparison. No evidence.

Levi's spreadsheet gave him evidence. Red turns to yellow. Yellow turns to orange. The numbers move. That's not motivation based on how it felt. That's proof.

The part that changes everything

There's a moment in the video where Levi gets into recording and reviewing your playing. He says, "At first, recording myself showed me just how shitty I sounded, but it kept me honest. There's no room for delusion if you're honestly checking your own results. Assess yourself constantly."

That is the part that resonates with me more than anything else. Recording and listening back to my playing has helped me improve more in the last few months than I had in a long time before that. And it's not even close. Just the act of recording regularly and then actually listening to what comes out, not what I think comes out, but what actually comes out, that's been the single biggest accelerator.

And here's the thing: I didn't have a color-coded spreadsheet. I didn't have structured 5-minute blocks across different techniques like Levi uses. I just started recording more. That one change made a significant difference.

Not fine, just okay

There's a moment in the video where Levi talks about not being fine and just being okay. About the gap between where you are and where you want to be. That connects to something I've been thinking about a lot.

I wrote in my first post about feeling like I'm not quite good enough. Not bad, just not where I want to be. And I think that feeling, that gap, is what makes people drift away from their instrument. It's not that they don't love music anymore. It's that sitting down and hearing yourself sound the same as last month, with no evidence that the work is working, eventually wears you down.

Anything that fights that feeling is going to keep more people playing. A spreadsheet. A recording you can compare against last week. Whatever. The tool doesn't matter as much as the habit of checking.

Ego, habits, and the self-taught problem

Levi talks about checking your ego at the door, taking real instruction, and focusing on deconstructing and rebuilding your core habits. That hit me hard because I'm largely self-taught, and core habits are the hardest thing to change once they're ingrained.

You don't even know your habits are wrong until something forces you to look. For Levi, that was world-class instruction and a tracking system. For a lot of us, recording is the first time we actually confront what we're doing. Not what we think we're doing, but what our hands are actually producing. Is your phrasing clean? Is your timing drifting? Is your pick attack consistent? You can't feel these things from inside the playing. You have to hear them from outside.

"If you play fast but sloppy, you're not fast, you're sloppy"

Levi says that near the end of the video, and it's one of those lines that makes you wince because you know it applies to you. Speed without control isn't progress. It's just noise that happens faster.

His whole approach, the spreadsheet, the structured blocks, the metronome ramps, is about building control first and letting speed come from that. Recording yourself is the check on whether you're actually in control or just moving your fingers fast.

The voice in your head

Near the end, Levi says something that I think everyone who's ever put down an instrument and picked it back up needs to hear. He says the biggest mistake that returning players make is getting discouraged by how bad they sound and quitting again. You have to be willing to suck again. You just need to accept it. And then, in classic Eyal Levi fashion: "Tell that voice in your head that says that you're too old or that your best days are behind you to shut the fuck up. Sit down with the metronome and put in the work."

I put down a guitar for twenty years. Twenty. If I thought too much about where I could be if I'd kept playing, that's where things get depressing. But I picked it back up, and I haven't put it down since. I might not have a color-coded spreadsheet, but what I do have is recordings from this week that I can compare to recordings from last month. And when I listen, I can hear that it's working. That's the thing Levi is talking about.