Tips For Your Guitar Practice Routine – Practice Like A Pro

There are so many videos and magazine articles featuring great guitar players but rarely do they talk about how much time and effort went into the guitar practice routine that made them so great. It always seems like these great guitar players were always great. It is very easy to forget (or not even realize) that at some point, these guitar players had the same struggles and frustration that you have. Playing guitar wasn’t always easy for them either.

The question you should ask yourself is “how can I get to the level of playing that [insert guitar player here] did?” Their example will show you what results are possible when you have an effective practice routine. You don’t have to practice guitar around the clock to do it either. It is far more important to have quality practice time.

Setting goals for yourself is very important. How can you get somewhere without first plotting the course?

Whether they are daily, weekly, monthly or yearly goals, hopefully you are doing all of those, the path forward gets clearer. As you set these goals, you should see the underlying things that need to be practiced and improved before the big goal can be reached. You can call those micro-goals.

An example of a big goal could be to create scale sequences and make them sound and feel more natural. Now that you have this big goal set, the micro-goals will also lay out for you. You see what you need to practice to reach that goal. You will have an easier time focusing during your practice sessions and the quality of your guitar practice session improves.

Staying with the same example from above, let’s look at the big goal and some possible micro-goals.

Big Goal 1- Creating Scale Sequences (order of notes)

Big Goal 2- Making them sound and feel natural

Micro-Goals

• Learning notes on the fretboard (or at least the starting note for your sequence)
• Playing the notes of the scale for one octave or less in one area of the neck
• Finding those same notes in another octave on the neck and playing the notes in the same order
• Applying rhythm to the sequence  – This alone can create a lot of possibilities so stick with it
• Making sure that you have good control of the picking hand
• Making sure that you have good control of the fretting hand
• Creating different sequences for the same scale (changing the order that you play the notes in)

Those are some of the possible things micro goals you can practice to reach the big goal. The great thing (in this example) about it is that the micro-goals help improve both big goals. You don’t have to have a bunch of different things for each big goal.

How To Get The Most Out Of Your Guitar Practice Routine

Another way to make your scale playing more musical is to improvise over backing tracks.

If you have recording software you can create your own backing tracks. You can also buy backing tracks or search them out online. When you using a backing track, challenge yourself to come up with variations of your licks. You could also play one lick over and over to get more comfortable with it.

You could change the timing of the lick/sequence to give a different feel. Remember to keep asking yourself “what else can I do with this?” and then answer the question.

It won’t take very long to see improvements in your guitar playing when you setting up your guitar practice routines this way. No matter how far along you get, always ask “what else can I do with this?” and you will continue to come up with cool new stuff. You will also stay inspired to keep practicing and getting better. Most important, you will have fun doing this.

The answer to this question is- As long as you can stay focused.

The amount of time you practice isn’t as important as the quality of your guitar practice routine. Some days you might find that you can practice and focus for hours. Other days you might find that you can only focus for 20 minutes. Maybe 10 minutes. They all can work, so don’t worry if one days practice is longer or shorter than the previous day.

You can also divide your practice time into smaller sessions so that you aren’t just “banging away” at one thing for a long period of time. Back to the scale example you could practice the sequences, make them rhythmic (musical), and improvise over a backing track all in the same session. Split your time between the 3 items in short bursts. For example do mini-sessions of 3-5 minutes for each and rotate through them. The mini session can be longer if you feel you need more time.

The important thing is to make sure that you don’t just stay on one thing for the entire time. If there is something that you are really having a hard time with, it is okay to take a break from it and come back to it later on.