Ways To Improve Your Guitar Playing in 30 Seconds
Regarding your guitar practice regime, are you making the most out of the little things? Using short-term bursts of specific practices to help towards your long-term goals? If not, now’s the time to start. Whilst 30 seconds may seem like no time at all, it’s all about how we perceive the time we have to work with. How can we get the most out of a mere 30 seconds? Well, it’s all about creating attainable goals and a positive learning path that enables us to track our progress and improvement. This comes with a little conscientious responsibility as there are things we can’t achieve in half a minute; however, there are many things that we can do. One of the best ways to take advantage of this is to think of using 30 seconds blocks as forms of pre-practice, allowing us to set micro tasks to help us achieve our short and long-term goals. Here are some tips to help you to start making the most out of 30 seconds of practice.
1. Scale Workouts
If it’s your fretboard knowledge you want to improve, 30 seconds can substantially impact achieving your goals. It’s just enough time to take any scale pattern, box, shape or key and refresh our muscle memory, which we should not take for granted. What’s more, is that we can create endless variations, moving between and linking box shapes to strengthen our fretboard knowledge further.
Taking 30 seconds to do this before we begin practising is a positive habit to form and one you can test your weaknesses with daily. For instance, say you’re great at memorising and visualising the A Natural Minor scale but not so much the F Natural Minor scale; dedicate this mental pre-practice warmup to your schedule. Working to improve your knowledge of F Natural Minor and navigating it on the fretboard for just 30 seconds per day will only ever reward you. Also, by implementing this, you set a short-term goal of improving your fretboard knowledge weaknesses before you’ve even begun practising, a super positive habit of falling into!
Before you know it, the keys and shapes that were once weaknesses are now sources of inspiration for arpeggio ideas, new phrasing paths and solo-building platforms. Every single one of us can improve our scale knowledge in 30 seconds, and it’s something we should all take advantage of and introduce to our practice schedule to see the fruits of our labour.
2. Limitation Exercises
Once you’ve gotten to grips with improving your scale shape knowledge and fretboard visualisation, there may still be problems you’re running into. Perhaps you’re great at remembering the shapes over certain strings but not so much over others. If this is the case, there are things you can do to combat these issues. Limitation exercises are a great way to put your playing under the microscope and something we can successfully apply to a 30-second practice block.
Try taking the scale shapes you’re familiar with and only playing them on the strings that you’re struggling to imprint in your memory, linking the scale from box to box. By doing this, you’re forcing yourself to improve your coordination, and with some help from the ears, it will start taking effect quickly.
We can also apply these limitation exercises to the number of fingers we use to execute a passage of play. If you feel a lack of strength in certain fingers or the movements between them, create a limitation exercise that forces you only to use the fingers that require attention, building strength and giving them a good warm-up.
Constructing these exercises once again into the idea of pre-practice can be very beneficial to dusting off the cobwebs on some areas that aren’t excelling as much as others before we begin our more extensive areas of practice.
3. Theory Tests
For many a guitarist, theory can often get left at the wayside, with the idea of having fun being at the forefront of our attention. This usually comes about because theory practice doesn’t set off our sensory neurons: it doesn’t fill us with that sense of ‘cool’ that simply picking up the guitar and rocking out does. However, it’s imperative to our learning and sustained progress as guitarists and musicians, and there are many quick, fun ways we can look to improve our theoretical vocabulary.
In 30 seconds, we can test ourselves with note and chord recognition exercises, figuring out what key a song is in and its chords. Many online practice tools are readily available, offering exercises and games to make what can often be a dull area of practice more fun and engaging. Using these tools and again implementing them into the idea of pre-practice, we are forming another positive learning habit that we only need 30 seconds to undertake. We can do so without affecting the areas of practice we enjoy.
Time dedicated to this will see theoretical rewards and make everything else you are doing easier, slowly chipping away at the visual boundaries that fretboard insecurities can create. Yes, theory can be tedious, but it doesn’t have to be - learn to have fun with it and use it to your advantage!
4. Tweaking Your Tone
Something we often don’t pay enough attention to when beginning a practice session is how our guitar sounds. The overall tone and perception of the sound of what you’re playing will significantly affect how you feel about the instrument and how you interact with what you are playing. This is something that, depending on the attention paid to it, can have a negative or positive impact on making progress.
Taking the time to adjust our tone accordingly to the context of our practice session is something that we should always do and something that, 9/10, takes at most 30 seconds. It goes back to what I mentioned earlier regarding conscientious responsibility. For example, if we are working on complex strumming patterns, it wouldn’t be very responsible for our learning to do so with our favourite distortion pedal maxed out. A cleaner, more articulated tone would be more suited to hearing whether we hit those accents and nuances.
Simply, if the guitar sounds bad, we are setting ourselves up to sound bad or, at least, limiting the maximum potential we can get from a practice session. If it doesn’t sit right with you, change it. It’s a good habit to get into and something you will look to every time you plug the guitar into an amplifier.
30 seconds may seem too little to benefit your improvement, but it can become an essential part of your overall practice schedule when used positively and productively. Try building these short but affirmative pre- practice workouts and begin to feel the power of change that lies within 30 seconds. Never underestimate it!
