4 Ways To Practice Guitar More Effectively

Let’s be honest, how many times do you pick up the guitar with good intentions, but without any plan as to what you will be practicing? This invites those noodle-fests!

Plans and activities kinda conjure up notions of restrictive structure and an almost military approach to practice. If this isn’t your bag, then think, instead, of a few outcomes you want from your practice time. Do this before picking the guitar up. What do you want to achieve? Master that lick, explore a new technique, work on a new song?

Walking away from a practice session with a set of achievements in the tank is a real confirmation that you are moving in the right direction. This also feeds into our good old ‘reward loop’ - the very thing which keeps us motivated to practice the next day!

To sum up - list the results you want, not the ‘stuff’ you’ll practice.

Remember when you sat down and worked really hard learning that scale, lick, riff, or concept? For most of us, some stuff sticks and plenty of new skills just fall into obscurity shortly after learning them. Sound familiar?

Everything we truly ‘know’ on the guitar has one thing in common - we use it frequently. The reason you never struggle to remember a power chord is because they are integral to your daily repertoire. That melodic minor scale, however, is collecting dust in the box marked ‘guitar stuff I once learned’ (we all have one of these!).

The lesson here is - apply anything new! Don’t leave it to ‘get dusty’. You‘ve learnt a new scale shape or sequence - get a backing track on! Play it slow, fast, change the rhythm, find it in another key, work it out in another position. Every time you apply your new knowledge it sticks and becomes part of your playing.

There is no truer example of this than learning a new song, riff or solo. As soon as you have that one section, half a riff, the first two licks etc, put that track on! Jam it out with the song or find a backing in the same key and loop the sucker until it’s ingrained. You will never have to relearn it and, better still, you won’t spend any valuable time staring at sheets of TAB trying to recall what you played in the first place!

In addition to some forethought about what you want to practice, preparation can be another key way to cut out any wasted time when practicing.

Line up anything you need. If you are learning from some video lessons, its better to have these selected and ready to go (even a mental note of which lessons you will be using is a good start). Set aside some separate time, away from your practice session, for finding and shortlisting lessons and videos.

Preparation extends to the readiness of your gear too. Take a few minutes to tune your guitar in advance, have your amp/pedals set up and ready at the flick of a switch.

It’s also important to prepare your environment. Turn off your phone, or set a do not disturb and close down social media tabs. These are a killer for you concentration. Deal with potential interruptions in advance and try to view your practice window as something sacred.

The temptation, with anything we have set our sights on mastering, is to give it our all. The more time we allocate, the better the result. Go hard or go home! Right?

The truth is, no matter how much time we throw at a single goal, our potential and concentration has a very finite limit. It is important to understand and accept that mastering that lick, improving your speed or playing that riff like Eddie, doesn’t happen during your practice session itself; the progress takes place once you stop, while your brain and fingers assimilate the information.

Give yourself permission to stop and move on. See the long game.

This approach to limiting the time to which you give each subject of your practice also frees you up to tackle more stuff. We all have a wealth of guitar challenges and skills we tell ourselves ‘we really should get round to practicing’. But we naturally put them off.

Set yourself a realistic and modest time limit for anything you plan to practice. Don’t overrun, it’s fine to pick it up again the next time you play. Move on to the next thing on your hit list and you will also be less open to frustration!