How to practise Guitar

On everything that people want to excel at, everybody knows that one needs to practise really hard. But nobody or very few people actually bother to think about how to. There’s always the right way in doing everything. Let alone learning to play and master guitar.

We always hear the phrase “Practise makes perfect”. This has somehow helped many people in developing the right mental attitude in trying to achieve something. But also, it has misled some people trying to learn things that require great amount of precision and technique such as guitar playing.

The right phrase to remember then is “Practise makes permanent”. This is more accurate since practising can also mean practising the wrong things and therefore you become good or great in doing the wrong things on the guitar (which isn’t perfect at all).

So now I am going to give you some highly beneficial guidelines that you can follow every time you practise guitar:

Focus

You need to constantly remember that you are teaching your brain and your muscles to do the right thing (in minute details). You should keep your attention right to what it is your doing. If you get distracted somewhere along the way just snap out of it and get back on track. This takes a lot of mental discipline but it is something you can get used to. It’s just a matter of forming good habits.

When you practise guitar you need some dedicated and undisturbed time for doing so. Don’t practise guitar anywhere near sources of distractions (TV, noisy people, etc.). If you live with non-musicians you need to communicate this to them and make them understand so that they may respect that undisturbed quality time that you ask of them.

Frequency

Never let a day go by without practising. Practising guitar for a few minutes every day is a lot better than practising for 8 hours but doing it only once, twice or three times a week. Of course this doesn’t mean that practising just for 5 minutes a day is fine. Practise for at least an hour a day.

But there are days when we are just too busy with other commitments and find it hard to fit the time in for practising. These are the days when you can practise for a few minutes and dedicate it to your weak areas only. Likewise you can do guitar exercises that have transferability features (more on this below).

Transferability

This means doing one particular guitar exercise that benefits more than one area of guitar playing. For example, playing guitar scales to the metronome up and down the neck—it helps you build speed and at the same time helps you to get familiarised with  different scale positions along the neck so that the next time you play a solo you know where your fingers need to go with great speed and accuracy.

Relax and Slow down

When practising new guitar techniques you need to be able to perfectly execute or articulate each note with great ease. This is the key to playing at lightning speed. You can see great guitar players play in great ease despite the level of difficulty that comes with what they are playing. It is because they are relaxed.

In order to develop proper guitar technique you need to teach your muscles every small things properly because it will remember every single thing you teach it. So you need to play things boringly and painfully slow at first to avoid making even the slightest mistake. Don’t be tempted to play things fast right away. It will only harm your technique. You will only develop bad habits and they are very hard to break, even harder than learning new difficult things.

Only increase speed when you can already play it with great ease for a repeated number of times.

Divide and Conquer

When practising long passages try to learn them in small 3-bar chunks and then try to connect them seamlessly. It's ok if you can play them just slowly at first. You can move on to speed building after you’ve been able to play the whole thing slowly.

Isolate

Pay attention to parts of exercises or passages you are having difficulties with. These are the things that you need to pay particular attention to (recording yourself playing and listening back will help you with this). You will then need to analyse what is keeping you from executing those parts correctly. After you’ve spotted the problem you can then slowly correct it in isolation. Just play it in the proper manner many times over (see Relax and Slow down above).

As you do this you will soon notice that that same mistake has disappeared and you can then start to build your speed gradually and the cycle goes on and on until you’ve reached your desired speed.

 Measure

Have a system for measuring your progress. Some aspects of guitar playing can be measured. For example, technique—you can draw a graph and put your maximum speed (you need a metronome) that you can play a technique cleanly at, on a weekly basis.

Some other aspects unfortunately cannot be measured (like your general playing skills, improvising, etc.). This is where recording yourself comes in handy. You can watch or listen to your recording a few months or weeks after and critique yourself and also appreciate how much you have progressed.

All these will be your ultimate driving force to keep on learning and practising guitar.

Goals

You need to set daily specific goals and strive to achieve it through your practise time for the day. You must then put it into your graph as part of your weekly cycle (if it is measurable). The results may vary. There are days when they are huge, there are days small. On some days you may even get no results at all and this would only mean that you are over-expecting. You then need to revise that goal into a more achievable one perhaps a part or small parts of that original goal (divide and conquer).

Organise

There are thousands of practice materials available depending on what your musical goals are. You have to have a system of filing these materials so that they are easily accessible when you need them and that no time which is absolutely nobody’s luxury, is wasted.

Also plan your practice regime ahead depending on what you want to achieve for the day. You can cover a lot of exercises in an hour. Just for an example, 15 min for warming up, 15 min for alternate picking, 15 min for sweep picking and 15 min for improvising. It should also vary from every week or two. You don’t have to practise same things over and over. This is not the key to mastering guitar. You should have a little bit of this and of that. Learning guitar is very similar to planting. You don’t need to water the plants all the time. Sometimes you just let the sun do its job and add some fertilisers for the plants to grow healthy.

Following the guidelines above will greatly help to improve your guitar playing. Now if you find it hard to understand and follow these, find a good guitar teacher who can help you and show you how to implement these things in great details.

Great guitar players didn’t become great simply because they were born that way. It is because they worked really hard with great teachers. And it didn’t happen overnight, it took them a while too! :)