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 — 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.
Always something very challenging. Not something beyond comprehension, but a song that I can pick away at. I don’t often push myself, but when I do, the results are obvious.
Anyway, Eugene’s trick bag was a big one for me. It’s not a song, per say, just a (Steve Vai) solo used to defeat the devil in an eighties movie.
Glass Prison has some similar arpeggio shapes.
Trying out different genres of music is also eye opening. I can play basic to advanced rock stuff easily. A little jazz or classical and my brain melts. To that end “las abejas” and “fly me to the moon” were like learning a foreign language. I don’t particularly like the latter, but it definitely showed me just how little I know.
Best of luck. Keep pushing yourself.