A Guitar Practice Plan that guarantees success!
Do you know what makes a great guitar player play great? If you could sit and watch the process that guitar pros used to get good fast and then become great you would see them using a lot of the same principles as they practice. How you practice will be how you perform or play, how your hands and fingers move, slow and uncoordinated or fast and fluid. Here are 5 ideas that any guitar player can do to improve immediately and continue to improve week by week,
1. When learning any new idea on the guitar whether it’s chords or a lead solo. Break it down to a few notes or moves and PLAY IT SLOW ENOUGH TO PLAY IT RIGHT! Break it down into chunks or parts. If you practice a part 100 times and play it right 80 times, that’s 80% right. Seems like that’s not bad. It also means you’ve practiced it 20 times wrong. This kind of practice will guarantee mistakes will be programmed in.
2. Let’s look at another concept that great player’s use. Two words that will give you success in everything you play on guitar is RIGHT REPETITION. You can play a part for an hour but not walk away with it getting much better. Repetition, repeating something over and over alone doesn’t guarantee results. What’s the solution? Play it 10 times correctly, then 10 more times correctly, the more times you play it correctly the easier it will get and you will get the result you’re looking for. Right repetition makes it easier and easier!
3. Make a list of these principles in a notebook. Read them over each time you practice and INTENTIONALLY USE THE PRINCIPLES until they become a regular part of how you practice. Especially in the beginning, I believe the guitar is more mental than physical. Using these principles allow you to get a great result each time you practice. This is a concept I had to learn to apply myself and teach my students. Is that even though I had the better way to make faster progress I wasn’t always using it and my progress was slow but every single time I practiced something slowly and repeating it many times it came together fast. Let’s apply playing it slow enough to play it right and play it many, many times and walk away with the part improved.
4. You should walk away from the guitar every time feeling like you’ve accomplished something. I call it the 3 M’s. MINIMAL, MODERATE AND MASSIVE PROGRESS. Learn how to rate your progress You should have a realistic goal for the week and break it down so by the end of the week you’ve either accomplished your goal or exceeded your goal. Working with a pro guitar teacher can help you learn this important skill. Many times students think they’ve done poorly or minimally when they’ve actually had success with working on something. You want to stay in the moderate to massive zone of progress.
5. Have you ever spent a few weeks or a month or more learning a skill or guitar part and then moved on. You’ve worked really hard to learn a song you love. Then you don’t play it for a while. We lose it. It’s so frustrating when that happens. We should have a list of songs and skills, keep a notebook or a computer file, we’ve learn and go over things a few minutes a week so we don’t lose it. The more you learn the more you have to juggle to keep your skills. Use the GAIN AND MAINTAIN principle. Once you’ve learned something you really like and want to keep then we have to keep reviewing it. How much time it takes to get a piece up a performance level depends on many factors, these are some of the main ones. We can take a week, a month or two to learn a solo part but only takes 10 minutes to review it. It’s like working out in the gym 5 days a week for several months and then we take off a couple months, then you will definitely lose the benefits.
These are a 5 concepts that can help you get better, faster in less time and maintain your skills as you grow. Review this list every time you practice and you will start automatically start learning chords, solos, songs and whatever you want to learn faster than ever. It’s worked for me, I became one of the top pro guitarists and worked for hundreds of students I’ve worked with. Give it a try, it works!
Sid