3 Step Guitar Practice Approach To Playing Anything You Want

3 Step Guitar Practice Approach To Playing Anything You Want

By Tom Hess

Have you ever spent a lot of time practicing something on guitar without making much progress? Even though you work really hard, you just can’t move forward... Then you feel like maybe you simply won’t ever become the guitarist you want to be.

Before I help you solve this problem for good, you have to understand that you CAN become an incredible guitar player, just like your favorite guitarists. If you aren’t achieving your guitar playing goals, it doesn’t mean you have no potential, or that you lack natural musical ability. It just means one or both of these two things:

1. You haven’t learned the proper steps to follow while practicing what will give you the ability to play whatever you want (I’ll tell you these steps in a moment).

2. This part is hard to grasp for a lot of guitar players (especially self-taught players) because it requires a deep understanding of how to practice guitar as effectively as possible. It’s simple to understand WHAT to practice (since these things are often rooted in common sense), but implementing them correctly is not so simple.

Think of your guitar playing as a struggle between two forces: one side being the practice you do to make your guitar playing feel easier, and the other side being the problems that consume your playing (making it harder than it should be). Whenever one side overcomes the other, your goal is split between the following:

• To continually make your practicing highly effective, so you can move your skills ahead much faster (learn additional ways to do this by reading my other instructional articles for guitar).
• To fix particular issues that prevent you from playing the things you want to play at the level you want (this is what I’ll show you below).

To help you completely understand the practicing process explained below, watch this video that demonstrates how this approach makes your guitar playing better. Do this now before you read the rest of this article.

Note: even though the video above shows how to practice guitar as efficiently as possible using only a single circumstance, the process for fixing problems can be followed for EVERY technique and musical playing style (from metal guitar licks to blues style double stops licks, to classical guitar chord changes).

Here is how to use the steps from the video you watched to find out how to play anything you want on guitar:

Step One: Act As A Doctor While Practicing Guitar

The fundamental mistake guitarists make while practicing is attempting to solve symptoms (things they believe to be problems) in their playing, instead of focusing on ROOT causes (the real problems). This applies in particular to the majority of self-taught guitarists, who were never shown how to effectively practice guitar. As you observed in the video above, it’s easy to misdiagnose a problem and falsely assume you know its cause, only to waste tons of time practicing the wrong things (all while making slow progress at best).

The greatest way to stop throwing away time on symptoms of problems and truly become a better guitarist, is to study with a great electric guitar teacher who can observe your technique and show you the exact things that keep you from improving In addition to giving you instant solutions to your musical struggles and frustrations, working with an expert teacher will help you to eventually become your own guitar teacher and figure out your guitar playing issues by yourself. This is easily the greatest benefit of guitar lessons, and is the reason why guitar players who learn with a great teacher quickly become killer players.

This is just like going to a doctor with some symptoms of feeling under the weather or having various pains in your body. Rather than prescribing medicine for the top level symptom of any issue you have, a great doctor tracks every symptom down to its root causes and treats it, causing you to feel much better (getting rid of all the symptoms at the same time). Of course, doctors aren’t born with knowledge of how to solve health problems – this knowledge is gained and learned. The same thing can describe your guitar playing: even if you struggle with identifying the root causes of any difficult guitar playing problems you have, you certainly CAN solve them and be your own guitar playing doctor.

Step Two: Transform Any Problem Into A Self-Sufficient Guitar Playing Exercise

Once you’ve identified the problem that is preventing you from playing what you want on guitar, your next move is to find out how to correctly isolate and fix it. As you observed in the video above, spotting the specific issue (the hammer on and pull off in that particular example) was NOT enough on its own. The next step is to place the problem into the original context to transform it into a self-sufficient exercise. “Self-sufficient” means it’s not necessary to search for any new guitar playing exercises to solve it - the problem becomes your exercise.

To discover more about how to do this step of the process, read this article about how to effectively practice guitar.

Step Three: Don’t Give Up Drilling Until You Find Gold

As soon as you identify the correct issue that must be fixed to move your guitar playing forward and correctly made it into its own exercise (as explained and demonstrated in the video above), you now have to practice the problem until it’s taken care of.

The crucial error that the majority of guitarists make in this step of the process is not doing enough quality repetitions of the exercise to build new guitar playing habits to replace any old ones. This mistake shows up in one of 2 versions:

Version One: Some guitar players stop working on the exercise prematurely - they get bored, lose their focus and quit after practicing for only a few minutes... never to come back to the exercise again. So they simply never complete sufficient repetitions of the exercise to improve their guitar playing.

Version Two: Others will move forward through strong discipline and willpower to end up practicing the exercise for many hours at a time. Although they perform many repetitions of the exercise, the quality of each repetition begins to decline as they play the exercise over and over, eventually losing focus. Check out this instructional column about practicing guitar mindlessly to find out more about this.

The right way to create a good habit is by continually practicing guitar in bursts of concentrated effort for several minutes at a time. Instead of practicing the same exact exercise for many hours on end, practice it for several minutes at a time, many times throughout the day, gaining tons of volume (repetitions) over the course of a week.

Version one of the mistake above frequently happens with guitar players who never use practice schedules. Their practicing is cluttered and random (and it shows in their playing).

In contrast, version two of the mistake above happens frequently to guitar players who don’t know the nuances of correctly training the body and the mind to play guitar. Instead, they work on building their practicing schedules using linear guitar practice approaches with a pen and paper.

To steer clear of both mistakes, you must be aware that teaching a human being to play guitar is much different than programming functions into a computer. It’s for this reason that you must use an effective guitar practice routine that is made specifically for getting big results.

Now that you know what is required for playing whatever you want on guitar, begin applying the advice provided in this article (and in the additional resources given throughout) to make your practicing more effective and your guitar playing much more easy.

If you still have a hard time attaining the results you desire from your practice time, you will achieve your guitar playing goals faster by working directly with me. Read this page about killer rock guitar lessons and share your biggest guitar playing challenges with me so I can help you overcome them.