Discover How To Make Guitar Practice A Lot More Effective

When you practice guitar effectively you get much more results, much faster. Read this article to learn 3 ways to make your practice a lot more effective.

Learn How To Make Your Guitar Practice Better And More Effective

Practicing guitar ineffectively is a recipe for frustration. Many guitar players spend years practicing in highly ineffective ways and wonder why they never get anywhere in their playing. When you improve the effectiveness of your practice, you see a massive increase in the results you get. This not only makes you a better player, but helps motivate you to keep practicing as you see yourself rapidly getting closer to reaching your musical goals. Here are a few ways to make your guitar practice more effective:

Understand That Your Practice Becomes How You Play

Make sure to practice guitar with 100% focus and intention to improve. Everyone has heard the saying: “practice makes perfect”. This could be clarified to “practice makes permanent”. Understand that the things you do during practice become how you play. This makes it extremely important that you learn how to play with correct fundamental technique when first learning a new concept. Unfortunately, many guitar players are in a rush to get better or play something specific and end up forming poor playing habits as a result. This is how you spend years developing bad technique, and why it becomes so difficult later to move beyond plateaus in your playing. Other guitarists spend their practice time noodling around instead of practicing seriously. This leads to little/slow progress at best, and leaves them wondering why they never get any good.

To make sure you don’t form poor playing habits, find a guitar teacher who can quickly spot your mistakes and correct them. This keeps you from wasting so much time later to correct your technique.

Jacob Melling, owner of the American Academy of Guitar Mastery says: “Working with a guitar teacher is the best way to ensure you’re solidifying good practice and playing habits. Without one, you will always have at least one or two blind spots in your playing. Without correcting them, you create a lot of frustration for yourself down the road.”

Don’t Worry About Practicing Tons Of Hours

You don’t become a better guitarist because you simply practice more hours. You become a better guitarist when your practice is very high quality due to its effectiveness and efficiency. Make sure your practice is always geared towards helping you reach your musical goals, and find ways to maximize the productivity of your time. For example, practicing string skipping helps you improve picking, two hand sync and various other skills all at once. Compare this to two hand tapping, which helps you improve mostly in only one area.

Don’t Neglect Aspects Of Your Playing While Focusing Too Much On Others

Many guitarists get too focused on wanting to improve specific areas of their playing that they totally neglect others. For instance, wanting to play fast so only practicing scales as fast as possible. This is very common, but often players who do this fail to practice things like phrasing, improvising or integrating techniques together. This creates a huge hole in their playing that actually prevents them from being able to use the speed they’ve worked so hard to develop.

Guitar teacher trainer, Tom Hess offers his advice: “Don’t allow imbalance in your playing by being too narrow in your practice. I’ve had many students come to me who can play fast but have no idea how to really play a good sounding solo. Work to integrate your skills together and make your practice musical whenever you can. This is one of the things I do in my teaching that has helped my guitar students become much better players.”

Apply the ideas of this article into your practice as soon as you can and you’ll be shocked at how much better your guitar playing gets!