Why Self-Taught Guitarists Commonly Do Not Become Great

As a guitarist learning on your own, know that your practicing habits determine if you become great or not. When you don’t have good practicing habits, you make musical progress very slowly.

It’s common for guitarists who learn on their own to form bad habits that hold their playing back. The following are some habits that you need to form to avoid falling into the same trap:

Good Habit #1: Don’t Make Things Harder Than They Need To Be

Guitarists who learn on their own form habits that make guitar playing more difficult than it needs to be. Over time, these bad habits get ingrained into their playing and make it harder to break them later on.

This makes it a struggle for you when you learn a better way to play but must go back and correct what you're used to doing. Common examples of this could be: using the wrong fingers to fret, only using alternate picking, muting string noise only with your palm and not your thumb, and more.

When you learn guitar using effective habits, it is easier to get better and you don’t have to waste time going back to fix it.

Good Habit #2: Focusing The Right Things At The Right Time

Many guitar players have the bad habit of repeating a difficult lick over and over. They believe that using this approach will eventually fix their mistakes. Instead, they end up wasting tons of practice time only to get minimal results if any.

A much more effective practicing approach is to focus only on the specific notes that are giving you trouble. You don’t need to continually repeat the other notes because you’ve already mastered them. Isolating your mistakes like this makes it easy to quickly identify where your playing is breaking down.

This way your practice time is used only to correct these things (making it much more efficient).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqCxPx5V24Y

Good Habit #3: Asking The Right Questions

Guitarists who learn by themselves frequently ask the wrong questions when it comes to getting better. This leads them down the wrong path, which takes them longer to see any results.

Guitar players who make the fastest progress ask themselves specific, high quality questions that get them the exact results they want as fast as possible.

Become a much better guitarist fast as you learn how to improve these productive habits by reading this guitar practice article.