As it is important for students who want to get the most out of their guitar lessons to have long term goals about what they want to achieve as guitar players, it is equally important to develop great practice habits to ensure success. A practice routine is one of the most important parts of learning an instrument. Even after you’ve achieved a certain level of success, it’s important to still practice new concepts to maintain your chops! Here are five practice habits that I feel will greatly improve your chances of success at guitar!
- Practice a piece of music, a riff, a lick, etc, slowly and correctly, the first time.
It’s important to make sure that you’re practicing your music with the right notes, rhythm, and fingering at the outset in order to keep you from having to relearn it later. You want to be sure that you’re not practicing mistakes and putting them into muscle memory, which makes it tough to break out the mistake. This will save a lot of time. Practice your music slowly, double-check the rhythm, and listen to a recorded version of the piece several times. If what you are playing doesn’t sound like the recording, then you need to find out the issue before you practice it over and over.
2. Practice a minimum of 15 minutes a day
This one I tell my students all of the time and the ones that abide by this guideline do better than the ones who don’t. Practicing a minimum of 15 minutes everyday forces you to pick up the guitar like the pros do, and streamline your practice session. Daily practice helps you remember the concepts and techniques far more than a marathon practice on a single day. Most people have 15 min free at some point in their day. When you only have 15 minutes to practice, you better make sure that you stay focused on the task at hand. Be sure to set a timer and when 15 minutes is up, stop!
3. Plan out what you are going to practice.
For this it is good to have a log-book of some kind to keep track of what you’ve been practicing. Often times we’ll cover a variety of concepts in the guitar lessons and you want to make sure that you get to them all during the week or so between your lessons. It’s a great idea to plan out a week of 15 min practice sessions so that you are sure to cover all the new concepts and whichever old ones that are necessary.
4. Practice in 15 minute increments.
This goes right along with the previous two habits. If you decide to practice longer than 15 minutes on certain days, it is still a good idea to break down your practicing into 15 min blocks of time so that you’ll be sure to take a break and move around between blocks as well as stay focused on what needs to be done to move your playing along.
5. Practice the difficult passages of a piece of music more often than the easy parts.
I have found this habit to be a great time-saver. Look over your piece of music and identify what passages are causing you the most trouble, circle them on the page, or if you’re learning by ear, write down the time that the trouble spots occur in the music. Practice only those passages during your practice session, then try the whole piece.
I hope this helps jumpstart your guitar practice and I hope to have more practice tips on this blog in the future!
~Dave