Whether you’re a beginner guitarist or seasoned pro, here are a few tips that will help you have a killer practice session every time you play your guitar!
Begin Integrating Skill sets
A common mistake a lot of guitar players make is only practicing various skills and techniques independently. While having a variety of skills and techniques is important, you also need to work on seamlessly integrating them together. For example, you’ll want to be sure you can do the following:
- Move from sweep picking an arpeggio into a scale sequence
- Add a nice vibrato at the end of a scale sequence
- Switch between rhythm and lead playing smoothly
- Change pickups at the appropriate time without any changes in your playing
Integrating skill sets is key to becoming a well rounded guitarist. At Northville Guitar Lessons, we teach you how to use various techniques together. Sign up for a free trial lesson today!
Stick to Your Plan
So you’ve made a great practice routine, and got it all planned out. Now you better make sure you do it! I’m sure there are plenty of things in your life where you have planned out how to do something, and then not taken the action to execute the first step in your plan. Make sure you start and that you keep going!
Record Your Results
If you haven’t started yet, it’s a great idea to keep a guitar playing journal of some sort. By keeping a guitar playing journal you’ll receive several major benefits:
- You’ll have a place to track your goals and achievements
- You can make notes of specific problems that arose that you need to work on in your next practice session
- You will be more focused on your practice
- You’ll be able to review your practice and decide what to work on next time
- Helps you maintain a long term focus on your practice
Keep Your Guitar Handy
If you have to get your guitar out, you are building a psychological barrier to even sitting down with your instrument. I keep my guitar in hands reach of my desk chair, plugged in and ready to go. All I have to do is reach out and pick it up.
I imagine this is a familiar scenario for you. You’ve had a long day and you get home and you are thinking about playing some guitar… but you are tired. You’ve worked hard. And now you have to get your guitar from the other room, get it out of the case under the bed, get it out of the cupboard etc etc. While this seems silly… when you are tired it’s a challenge! And that challenge is often trumped by TV and watching cats on YouTube.
Keeping your guitar out and in front of you will also encourage you to practice it, because it is right there in front of you, continuously reminding you that there are dreams waiting to be fulfilled.
Stay Focused
The amount of focus you bring to a practice session directly effects how much you will progress in that practice session. You want to be as intensely focused as possible, your mind should be like a laser cutting steel. When you sit down to practice, you want to make sure that your practice is the only thing that has your attention. You don’t want:
- Music playing in the background,
- To be watching TV while you “practice”
- Eat while you “practice”
- Check email/social media
Now, once you have yourself focused on the task at hand (becoming a great guitar player), you want to keep it going and you want to avoid…
Eliminate Distractions
It is hard to maintain focus if you are interrupted and distracted. Here are some things you can do to make it as easy as possible to focus on your playing:
- Put your phone on airplane mode – text messages and notification popping up, buzzing and flashing away are very distracting.
- Turn off your email client – you don’t want new emails coming in trying to steal your focus every few minutes.
- Discuss with family members not to interrupt you for the next 30minutes. Unless the house is on fire, what they have to say can probably wait.
- Tidy your desk in advance so you aren’t surrounded by reminders of unfinished tasks.
If you want to stop making mistakes with your guitar playing, learn to play guitar with uxbridge guitar lessons today