Am I progressing well enough at the guitar?
It depends a little bit on your goals. Definitely keep learning songs you love, no matter what. If your goal is to improve simply as a guitarist, then just choose more difficult songs with more complexity and technical demands. We live in the best time in the world to learn music. Look up songs in other genres. Try fingerpicking, strumming, flat-picking, and switch it up. Try jamming on songs. Study one artist's entire catalogue, or certain eras of that artist's work. These are great ways to not only improve, but even get a little glimpse of what is going on in the brains of the musicians you're emulating.
BUT... if your long-term goal is to improve as a guitarist and more generally, as a musician, just be sure to include some music theory in there, and get your ear involved. You'd be surprised how many people learn to play songs, but never learn to play music!
For example, tabs and tutorials can be great for one-song-at-a-time learning, but ask them to do anything more than that, and they'll fall flat on their collective faces. They can also become a buffer between you and real, long-term musical growth, as they tend to foster a short-term, song-based, technical approach that is dependent on pre-packaged musical info. With enough of a dependence on this material created/written by others, we may even become inocculated to musical growth... vaccinated against musicianship.
For a holistic, sustainable, long-term approach to growing as a musician, we need to go beyond single songs. We need to stop looking for all of our help from the outside, and we need to look within to our own ear and our own understanding of music, and develop those! To do this, as I mentioned above, we simply incorporate music theory and ear-training. One song at a time can be fun and even super challenging if you pick songs that have some tricky techniques and passages. But if you are interested in writing songs, improvisation, re-arranging parts, transposition, collaboration, exchanging ideas with other musicians--in those situations--you may find yourself get stuck from time to time. Thankfully, this sounds like it hasn't happened to you yet. But trust me, it always does when we pursue something that's really worth pursuing. In this case, what is so worth pursuing, I'll argue, is musicianship.
To really grow in leaps and bounds, you have to be able to take the music you love and not just simply replicate it, but do something new with it. I mean, by all means, break down the song you love into manageable pieces, put it back together, practice it until you sound amazing and can nail all of the little artistic nuances and techniques. But try to go one step beyond this and create something new with the musical insights you should start looking for in the songs you love. Until you challenge yourself to do something new with the musical ideas these songs introduce you to, you will find yourself stuck in familiar patterns.
For example, if I didn't study a really simple song by Radiohead named "Videotape," I never would have learned this amazing musical concept I call "hidden syncopation," something I shared with Consequence of Sound in an interview about what I do on YouTube with Radiohead's music. Now, when I write songs, I can think about how to use this concept in my own stuff. But I never would have if I hadn't thought about the song in a deeper, more musically insightful way.
I can't tell you how many people find themselves picking up their guitar and feeling like they've played everything they wanted to play but still have nothing to say musically of their own, or simply feel like they don't know what they want to play anymore. This won't be you for a long time, hopefully. But it does happen, and the way to break out of it is to get into the songs you love in a deeper, more insightful way. Not just to regurgitate the superficial stuff, but to learn to think like the musicians who wrote those parts themselves.
Practical steps: get a good teacher to supplement your already awesome drive to learn. Read up on or ask your teacher about how chords and scales work. How are chords named and built? Try creating your own chords, or different voicings of chords you already know to inject new life into old songs. Read/learn about scales and how they explain and organize melodies, and chords. Try soloing over the songs you love, writing auxiliary parts, coming up with counter-melodies. Read/learn about rhythm and the different ways songs are structured rhythmically. Try counting along to songs with different rhythmic structures, like songs in 4, in 6, in 3, in other odd/mixed meters. Try creating your own picking and strumming patterns. Try programming an online drum machine [1]to jam along with.
Am I progressing well enough at the guitar?
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