How To Stop Wasting So Much Guitar Practice Time And Become A Better Guitar Player Fast

How To Stop Wasting So Much Guitar Practice Time And Become A Better Guitar Player Fast

by Tom Hess

The hardest part of achieving your biggest guitar playing goals isn’t that you don’t have enough time to practice... nor is that you have too little knowledge about guitar playing or music. Fact is, you need to learn how to become highly efficient in the use of your practice time in order to get the maximum benefit from each session.

After helping thousands of guitar students over the years get results in their playing, I found that guitarists often use their practice time very ineffectively. By wasting so much practice time, you drastically prolong the time it takes to reach your musical goals. Once you are able to get results from every single second of guitar practice, your progress will skyrocket.

As the first step down the path of more effective guitar practice, discover how much you really know about practicing guitar by completing this guitar practicing routine assessment.

These are the 4 practice habits you must avoid in order to make faster progress:

1. Practicing Some Tasks Too Much While Practicing Others “Not Enough”

This is a very frequent mistake I see. Here’s why it happens:

1. A lot of guitar players figure that all they must do is practice everything for an equal amount of time. This is incorrect. Truth is: not all musical skills need to be practiced with the same frequency as others. Some musical skills (such as writing songs) should be worked on less often, but in more time per practice session. On the other hand, technical guitar licks may require a higher frequency of practice with moderate time used each session. When you randomly divide up the time spent on each task into equal segments in your schedule, you end up scheduling a lot more time than what is needed for some items and not enough for others. As a result, you make extremely slow progress in all areas.
2. It’s common for guitarists to only practice on things they are already good at. As a result, they don’t improve their weaknesses, bringing their overall guitar playing down as a whole.

How you divide up your guitar practice time also depends on some other variables. These include: how much time you have to practice, how good you are at each item, your personal guitar playing goals, and how certain items are best practiced and mastered. When any of this is altered, you need to change your practicing routine. If you don’t, you’ll end up with unbalanced skills and ineffective practice.

1. Practicing Guitar Playing Elements In The Incorrect Order

The particular order of items you practice is instrumental for how much/little improvement each practice session offers you. This applies on both a small level and a zoomed-out, macro level. Macro level meaning: the various types of musical skills (such guitar playing technique, theory, ear training, etc.). The smaller level means the specific exercises within each area. To make your practice more effective, you need to identify the best order for both the types of musical skills and the specific exercises within each category.

To get more results from your practicing sessions, use the guitar practicing schedule generator.

1. You Don’t Warm Up Effectively Before Each Practice Session

Everyone is aware that you need to warm up before getting into a heavy practice session. However, not many people do this on a consistent basis and even less do this properly. So many players think that “warming up” is done to warm up their fingers using chromatic licks or other such exercises. This totally wastes your time, and here’s the two main reasons why:

1. You end up “practicing” this warm up exercise during the time when you could be learning something you actually intended to learn/improve.
2. Even worse, warm up exercises are often practiced in a completely mindless manner – without even paying attention (while watching tv, talking to someone, etc.). This bad habit often transfers over to “real” practice once the warm up is over.

Stop using these pointless warm up exercises. The exercises you should be using to warm up are the ones you actually set out to practice in the first place – merely played at a slower speed. Pay close attention while you warm up as well so that your brain is being actively “warmed up” in addition to your fingers.

1. Practicing At Speeds That Your Brain Can’t Catch Up To

“Practicing guitar” is much more than simply “repeating the same movements over and over again”. You need to focus both your mind and your ears on particular elements of your guitar playing and refine them. For instance, rather than randomly playing a scale pattern over and over, you can observe your picking hand to ensure that you aren’t using excessive motion. You could also practice while making sure that the notes do not ring together as you transfer from one string to the next.

Your brain analyzes every note you play and has to make specific adjustments to move your hands where they need to go. If you frequently practice faster than your mind can “analyze”, you are merely reinforcing whatever habits (whether good ones or bad ones) you already have.

Now that you have a better understanding of the main reasons why so many guitar players cannot get results from their practice sessions, work on finding out exactly what you must do to make your practice more effective. Complete this guitar practicing routine assessment, and get free feedback from me on how to quickly become a better guitarist.