Many guitarists start out with the dream of becoming a great guitar player and it’s well within the reach or anyone willing to put in the work to learn their craft but the work is what stops many people. Practice won’t always be exciting and will sometimes be downright boring if you don’t go at it with a plan and some discipline . When you first start to play guitar, it’s easy to practice because you’re basically just sitting around noodling away and getting to know the instrument, you have no real direction or agenda and things are pretty simple. Sooner or later you’re going to see or hear other guitar players that are playing things a little beyond your current ability and you’ll want to ramp your skills up so you play that well.
The good news is that everyone starts basically at zero and builds on their skills from there. How fast you excel or how far you go is entirely up to you but you can rest assured that having disciplined practice will allow you to go further faster.
You’ll want to pick specific times for practice. Pick times when you can concentrate just on the task at hand without anything interrupting you. Have all of your household chores and duties done and out of the way, homework done, dog walked, and everything else that could interrupt and interfere.
Create a practice plan and stick to it until each topic is very well understood and you can play it very fluidly and easily. You can break things up into categories like this for example:
- Warm up - Major Scales - Free jamming - Minor scales - Riffs from songs you like
...and so on.
The idea is that you’ll stick to the plan every day until you‘ve master the topics. Play slowly and cleanly and with a metronome if possible.
Resist the urge to want to play fast too soon. It will come with time, but you’ll be a much better guitarist if you take the time and effort to cleanly pick every note.
So you want to practice regularly and with a plan as well as playing everything you learn very deliberately so as to get it perfect before you move on. Once you’re confident that you’ve got it down, move onto something else to keep challenging yourself.
