3 Tips For Better Practice

Hi, everyone! Thanks so much for reading my blog. I’m inspired by your willingness to read awesome content.

I wanted to start with a quick post on what will surely be the main topic of this blog: how to practice! Any guitarist who wants to improve as much and as fast as possible must first and foremost examine their practice habits. People  tend  to worry that they don’t have the availability or dedication to put enough hours in, and fail to see that the way they practice isn’t working for them.

Today I want to share with you some of the best advice I’ve heard on making the most of whatever little practice time you have. All of these tips apply equally whether you have six hours to practice or just five minutes (a rigorous five-minute session can be of great value, by the way).

1.  Slow It Down

Most everything we do these days, we expect to do quickly. We get in the car and drive over the speed limit. We abandon a website if it loads a few seconds too long. We prefer chowing down on fast food to cooking from scratch.

I’ll say this many times in many posts: your life habits become your guitar habits, for better and for worse. If you’re always in a rush, moving from one thing to the next, constantly looking at your watch, etc., then your guitar sessions will take on that same hurried energy. You’ll play too fast.

How fast, by the way, is “too fast?” Any speed at which you are not completely comfortable with what you are playing, where you’re not making beautiful music, where any movement feels difficult, is too fast. I put this tip at #1 because it’s extremely important. In fact, if there’s just one thing you’re ever going to get out of this blog, please let it be “play slowly.” If I had only two words to express my

method, my advice for any aspiring guitarist, they  would  definitely  be  “play slowly.”

I’ll discuss slow playing in more detail in future posts, but for now just remember to slow things down whenever you feel off during practice.

2.  Focus On the Music

 This one may seem obvious enough, but it’s surprisingly easy for guitarists to be so concerned with what their fingers ought to be doing that they barely listen to the sounds they’re making. Being a good guitarist has everything to do with the music you play! The finger acrobatics are just a means to an end; necessary, sure, but ultimately somewhat trivial.

There’s an idea in Daoist philosophy that a fisherman, once having caught a fish, can forget the net. In language, once you’ve “caught” the meaning of a sentence, you can forgot the words. A guitarist should aim to achieve the music, and forget the fingers.

3.  Watch Your Attitude

 This one is more than grade-school scolding. The state of mind you bring to your practice session will almost wholly determine what’s possible during that session, and your enduring attitude (or set of attitudes) about your guitar playing will be the sum of every session’s average frame of mind.

Be careful what you think! I’m convinced  that  every  narrative  you  form  about your relationship to the guitar can have a lasting effect on your potential. If you’re always saying to yourself, “I’m too old to learn,” or “I’m not a natural musician,” or “You need extra long fingers to play well, and mine are stubs,” then you’re guaranteeing stunted progress.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this content helpful and I look forward to expounding on each of these tips in the near future.