How to get results from guitar practice

If you’re not already subscribing to sites like “Express Guitar“, maybe you find that your guitar-playing goals are hard to reach due to a lack of available practice time or limited knowledge? I’ve got some good news for you. You can very quickly achieve your guitar playing goals – you just need to understand exactly how to make your practice time extremely effective.

Some guitarists use their practice time very ineffectively. By wasting practice time, they drastically prolong the time it takes to reach their musical goals. But if you are able to get results from every single second of guitar practice, your progress will skyrocket.

Here are the four guitar practicing habits you need to correct in order to make faster progress:

1. Practicing Some Items too Much and Others too Little

This mistake is commonly made because of the following:

1. Improperly managed Guitar Practicing Time. A lot of guitar players practice everything for an equal amount of time. This is incorrect. Truth is: not all musical skills need to be practiced with the same frequency as others. Technical guitar licks may require a higher frequency of practice with moderate time used each session. When you randomly divide up the time spent on each task into equal segments, you end up scheduling a lot more time than what is needed for some items and not enough for others. As a result, you make  slow progress in all areas.

2. Instant Gratification Practice. it’s common for guitar players to waste time practicing things they are already highly proficient in. As a result, they never actually advance in the areas they are weak in, bringing their overall guitar playing down as a whole.

How you divide up your guitar practice time also depends on some other variables. These include: how much time you have to practice, how good you are at each item, your personal guitar playing goals, and how certain items are best practiced and mastered. When any of this is altered, you need to change your practicing routine. If you don’t, you’ll end up with unbalanced skills and ineffective practice.

2. Working on Elements of Guitar Playing in an Incorrect Order

The particular order of items you practice is instrumental for how much/little improvement each practice session offers you. This applies on both a small level and a zoomed-out, macro level. Macro level meaning: the various types of musical skills (such as guitar playing technique, theory, ear training, etc.). The smaller level means the specific exercises within each area. To make your practice more effective, you need to identify the best order for both the types of musical skills and the specific exercises within each category.
3. You Don’t Warm up Effectively

Everyone understands the importance of warming up before practicing. However, very few people truly do this and far less do this properly. A lot of guitarists believe that “warming up” means literally warming up their fingers by running through a special set of movements or chromatic exercises. This actually wastes your time, and here’s why:

1. You spend too much of your practice time practicing things that have NOTHING to do with the materials you wanted to practice that day.

2. Even worse, you’re often disconnected from these exercises mentally because you see them as “just warm-up”. As a result, you mentally prepare yourself to do the same as you practice the items you really want to improve. Your brain is just as important as your fingers while practicing guitar.

Stop wasting countless amounts of time trying to find good warm-up exercises. The exercises that are best used to warm up with are the ones you intend to practice – only played at a slower tempo. Also, your brain should be warming up as well as your fingers. Stay focused and pay close attention while warming up in order to prepare yourself for your practice session.

4. Practicing at Speeds that Your Brain Can’t Handle

“Practicing guitar” is much more than simply “repeating the same movements over and over again”. You need to focus both your mind and your ears on particular elements of your guitar playing and refine them. For instance, rather than randomly playing a scale pattern over and over, you can observe your picking hand to ensure that you aren’t using excessive motion. You could also practice while making sure that the notes do not ring together as you transfer from one string to the next.

Your brain analyzes every note you play and has to make specific adjustments to move your hands where they need to go. If you frequently practice faster than your mind can “analyze”, you are merely reinforcing whatever habits (whether good ones or bad ones) you already have.

Now that you have a better understanding of the main reasons why so many guitar players fail to get great results from their practicing sessions, find out exactly what you should do to make your guitar practice more effective.