The Art of Effective Guitar Practice

Do you ever feel like you're practicing guitar a lot, but not making progress? While any practice is better than none, there are a few things we can do to make our guitar practice sessions more effective. In this quick guide, let's take a look at a few things we can do to get more out of our guitar practice.

Focus on one specific thing at a time

If you’re trying to get good at too many things, it’s hard to get great at any of them.

There's an endless amount of things we want to learn as guitar players. As soon as we get to the top of one peak, there's another even bigger peak ahead of us.

I've found myself getting overwhelmed with guitar on many occasions. We think in order to be a 'good' guitarist, we need to learn how to how to play every genre of music - from rock, to jazz, bluegrass, funk, and more.

We think we need to master things like alternate picking and fingerstyle. Bill Frisell and Julian Lage are regarded as 2 of the best guitar players in the world. Frisell plays with nearly all downstrokes. Lage has admitted he can't really play fingerstyle.

We think we need to know a ton of music theory. The Beatles are the most successful band of all time, and knew very little music theory. John Mayer has said he never learned much music theory.

We think we have to be experts at reading music. Many of the most highly regarded guitar players of all time (including Jimi Hendrix) never learned to read music.

You don't need to know everything.

The goal is to play the music in your head on guitar - and to have fun doing it.
Find the style of music you enjoy listening to and playing, and fully commit to it. Enjoy the process of practicing and learning, with the understanding that you will never know everything about guitar. Nobody does.

Research shows that people who have multiple goals at a time (such saying “I’m going to practice guitar an hour a day, exercise a half hour a day, drink 8 glasses of water every day, and write an hour a day”) ended up being less committed – and do not have the same likelihood of succeeding.

When you try to start a new habit, it takes conscious effort to remember to do it. We all have a lot of different things going in our lives. If you try to do too many new things consistently, you typically end up getting overwhelmed and don’t do any of them.

After a while though, you develop a pattern, and doing the task you set out to do becomes easier and easier. It eventually becomes mindless; you just do it.

When you begin practicing a new habit it requires a lot of conscious effort to remember to do it. After awhile, however, the pattern of behavior becomes easier. Eventually, your new habit becomes a normal routine and the process is more or less mindless and automatic.

This only occurs as the result of lots of repetition and practice.

When you start, you need to put in a conscious effort to do the task (in our case, practicing guitar). After around 30 days, the habit becomes pretty routine. After 60 days, the process becomes automatic. Multiple studies have shown that it takes an average of 66 days for a habit to become automatic, but it can often be much faster than that.

Use the Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique uses a simple timer to help you manage your time.

First, remove all distractions beforehand. Put your phone in a different room. Turn of distractions on your computer.

Set a timer for 25 minutes, and work on one specific task. After those 25 minutes, take a 5 minute break. Repeat this process as many times as time allows.

When it comes to guitar practice, this can mean working on one specific section of a song, one chord progression, one scale, etc..

25 minutes goes by very quickly when you're not constantly distracted by other things.

Break Things Down into Small Chunks

We learn best by focusing on small amounts of material at a time.

If you're trying to learn a long and complex song or guitar part. Break into into small pieces. That can be as small as one bar of music, or one short section of a piece. Get that section down before moving on to the next.

Be Consistent

Regardless of what you're trying to accomplish, you don't have to be the fastest, smartest, or more talented person to reach your goals. You have to be the most consistent.

To create long-term habits, you have figure out how to be consistent. I know that seems overly obvious and simplistic, but how can we do that?

Research shows that you are 2-3 times more likely to stick with your habits if you make a specific plan for when, where, and how you will perform the behavior.

When it comes to practicing guitar, our goal should be to come up with a consistent plan where we state the time and place to practice. For example,“During the next month, I will practice guitar at 8:00 pm for at least 20 minutes in my bedroom”.

Research also shows that writing this down and putting it on a calendar greatly increases the likelihood you’ll stick with the schedule. I prefer using actual paper and a physical calendar for this type of thing, compared to using an app on my phone. We typically have too many apps on our phone, and too many things fighting for our attention. It’s too easy to just ignore the app and never complete the task.

This simple technique has been shown to greatly increase the odds that people will stick with things such as exercising, stopping smoking, and studying.

We all have different schedules. Practicing guitar a half hour a day is more beneficial than 3 & half hours once a week.

Be Productive; Not Busy

There's a difference between being productive and being busy.

Let's say you want to learn how to cook. The best way to learn is so get some, recipes, ingredients, and start cooking. That's productive.

What a lot of people do is first think they need to get some high-end pots, pans, and cooking tools, so they spend time shopping for cooking gear. Then they read 5 books about various styles of cooking. Then they watch a bunch of YouTube videos about cooking, and follow the top chefs on Instagram.

While those things can be helpful, what they really need to do is just start experimenting with cooking. All the other stuff is making them feel like they're being productive, when they're really just being busy.

You won't learn how to swim by reading books on swimming. You need to jump in the water.

Practice New Things

Deliberate practice is important.

Instead of sitting down and playing the same song, chord progression, or guitar solo you've been playing forever, try to play something that's challenging, and a bit outside of your comfort zone.

Take it slow

Learning guitar is not a race.

A lot of learning guitar is building muscle memory, and it's more effective to practice a piece slowly and accurately than to try to play it fast, but sloppily.

Lastly, remember playing guitar is supposed to be fun. While some people make a living from music and guitar playing, the reason all of us originally picked up a guitar was to have fun, and to create music.

Enjoy the journey; That's the whole point.