After years of teaching and playing guitar, I’ve learned that how you practice matters far more than how long. These are the habits and strategies I wish someone had told me about when I was starting out — they would have saved me years of spinning my wheels.
The most important thing in any discipline is consistency. Simply put, how often you practice is exponentially more important than how much. A small amount of practice every day is far better than skipping days or weeks and losing your momentum.
Try your best not to take days off. Bring the guitar when you travel if possible, even if just to noodle for a few minutes. The goal is to keep your fingers familiar with the instrument and your brain engaged with music.
Don’t keep your guitar locked away in a case. Studies have shown that even a small amount of inconvenience or friction can be a massive deterrent and prevent you from picking it up. If you want to encourage good practice habits, keep your guitar front and center on a stand where you can see it.
If you have more than one guitar, keep another by the couch and another upstairs in your office or bedroom. Make it easy to plug in and play if you have an electric. Keep your amp settings dialed in, picks within arm’s reach, and your strap ready to go.
Even if you’re not a singer, singing is wonderful ear training. It gets you in the habit of learning the melody of a song instead of just the chords and riffs. This is extremely valuable for memorizing material and building rhythmic coordination.
If you struggle to sing and play at the same time, start with a simple song that has a very basic strumming pattern. Here are a few great ones to try first:
The key is to pick something where the strumming is so easy it becomes automatic, freeing your brain to focus on the vocals.
Throughout my career as a musician and teacher, I’ve gone through phases of focus. I spent a great deal of time on technique and theory, but to be truly successful you have to find ways to make musical improvements — not just technical ones. Here are the four elements I consider the keys to effective practice.
Keep in mind that guitar teachers and books, no matter how complex, always have the simple goal of helping you play music. Nothing holds more truth and value than recordings of the music you love. Every guitarist should spend at least a third of their practice time learning music by ear and playing along with recordings.
If you’re not ready to figure out music by ear or the task seems too daunting at this stage, start by trying to figure out simple tunes like “Happy Birthday” from memory and getting them to sound decent on your instrument. After six to twelve months of playing guitar from sheet music and learning from friends, you’ll start to recognize patterns and be able to figure out more complex things on your own.
Not everyone needs to aspire to be Matteo Mancuso, Paco de Lucía, or Yngwie Malmsteen, but technical practice is meant to get your fingers up to a proficient level so you can play the things you want to play without overexerting, hurting yourself, or hitting a plateau.
Make your exercises as musical as possible. Warm up slowly, and most importantly, make sure you’re challenging yourself with new movements — not just repeating the same exercise regimen the same way every day. Your brain needs variety to form new neural connections.
For a beginner, this could be as simple as locating all the “A” notes on the fingerboard. For a more advanced player, it might mean running all the seventh-chord arpeggios in an unfamiliar or tricky guitar key like D♭.
Find a weakness in your fingerboard knowledge and go at it for fifteen to twenty minutes. If it’s painful and slow, then it’s probably a good blind spot to be working on.
Transcription usually focuses on learning fragments of something each day, but repertoire practice has a different goal: learning complete songs or pieces that you plan to play publicly or jam with others.
This could be a set list for a new band or just five simple songs you wish you could strum around the campfire. The important thing is that you’re always working toward a musical goal and practicing with a performance mindset.
