Guitar Playing Test For Reaching Musical Goals

Think you know a lot about becoming a great guitarist? There exist tons of myths regarding playing making improvement through practice. Guitar players who believe in these myths almost never achieve their musical goals. Guitarists who learn how things really are, make fast progress and become better players in less time.

Find out if you are close to achieving your musical goals with the following test:

Question #1: Which approach will help you reach your musical goals the fastest?

a. Getting information from many different sources

b. Learning by yourself

c. Learning information from one proven, reliable source

Learning from many sources can be harmful (even if they are good sources). Here is why:

- You begin learning in an arbitrary and mindless manner. The particular order in which you learn new things has to be controlled in order to be effective at getting you to understand and improve. Cramming a lot of new information into your brain makes it difficult to know what you should focus on, when exactly you should focus on it and when you should move onto something else.

- You cause yourself to become overwhelmed due to taking on an abundance of new information. This quickly removes your motivation to practice. It becomes much easier to just learn new things instead of getting better through practice.

- Arbitrary learning makes it hard to focus on accomplishing particular goals. This also makes it less likely that you’ll track and measure your progress. You don’t know what your skill level is and what you need to do to get better.

These issues will massively slow down your progress.

Learning on your own also greatly limits the speed at which you can make progress. Self-taught guitarists often don’t know what to focus on, when they should be focusing on it, what they should be working on and how they should practice in order to reach their guitar playing goals.

You only really become an amazing guitarist fast by learning from a single proven source. This ensures that you never go down the wrong road on your way toward reaching your goals.

Question #2: What is the most effective picking technique for playing scales on guitar?

a. Alternate picking technique

b. Directional picking technique

c. Economy picking technique

d. All of the above (there all equally effective)

The majority of guitarists think that there is no “best” picking technique. This is not the case. There are picking techniques that are more effective than others. The answer is: directional picking. This column explains why directional picking is the greatest picking technique for guitar.

Question #3: What do you do when you feel overwhelmed by things to practice for guitar?

a. Take a break away from practicing

b. Force yourself to learn more and become more disciplined

c. Work on integrating everything you know together

Taking long breaks from guitar practice won’t help you make progress. It takes away from the time you could be investing into becoming a great guitarist.

You can transform yourself into a great guitarist without taking a break from guitar practice. Additionally, you won’t need to have ample amounts of discipline in order to practice guitar every day. You just need to learn how to balance learning new things with integrating new concepts together with what you’ve already mastered. By doing this, you’ll be able to continually get better at guitar without dealing with feelings of overwhelm.

The following video explains what it means to integrate your guitar skills together:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7GORmlZg1Qk

Question #4: What is the most effective way to build your guitar speed?

a. Practicing to a metronome on a consistent basis

b. Practicing the correct speed exercises

c. Having a lot of patience and spending a lot of time practicing

d. Mastery of guitar technique fundamentals

A metronome is good for testing your speed, but not good for developing it. Guitar speed only comes through sound fundamentals. Practicing a lot while using bad technique only solidifies poor habits and makes it impossible to play fast.

To become a faster guitarist, you have to be familiar with which techniques you need to improve upon. This is a very crucial step because it forms the foundation you need for being able to play guitar fast. Only then can you use a metronome to raise the foundation to higher speeds.

This guitar speed resource shows you how to double your guitar speed and cut your practicing time in half.

Question #5: What is the easiest and fastest way to master fretboard visualization for guitar solos?

a. Memorize every note on the guitar fretboard

b. Master a single scale and learn to use it all over the fretboard

c. Learn tons of new scales

d. Learn guitar licks from guitarists of many styles

Fretboard visualization simply refers to the ability to play and improvise phrases on any area of the neck. Memorizing the names of notes on individual frets won’t help you with fretboard visualization. Why? Because this doesn’t help you see patterns on the fretboard or stay in the correct key as you solo. To greatly improve your fretboard visualization, work on learning how to play a single scale all over the neck. Once you can visualize the neck as one single scale shape, it becomes totally easy to improvise solos.

What you should do now?:

1. Create a list of the guitar playing myths you failed to identify while taking this test. This helps you understand what you should focus on in order to improve.

2. Don’t worry if you answered many questions wrong. Now you understand what you must do to get better. Be excited about this!

3. Use the tips from this article to achieve your musical goals.

This free guitar playing assessment helps you understand more about your musical strengths and weaknesses.