Learning Disciplined Guitar Practice

By: Laurie Lea

Many guitarists start out with the dream of becoming a great
guitar player. It's well within the reach of anyone willing to
put in the work to learn their craft but all the hard 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 that you play as well as
they do.

The good news, realistically, is that everyone starts at zero
and builds on their skills from there. How quickly you excel or
how far you can go is entirely in your hands but you can rest
assured that having disciplined practice will allow you to go
further faster.

You'll want to pick definite, specific times for practice.
Choose times when you can concentrate in a focused way on the
task at hand without anything interrupting you. Have all of your
household chores and duties completed and out of the way,
homework done, dog walked, and everything else that could
possibly interrupt and interfere.

Work out a practice plan and stick to it until each topic is
completely understood and you can play it very fluidly and
easily. You can break practice up into categories like this for
example:

- Warm up - Major Scales - Free jamming - Minor scales - Riffs
from songs you like

- Warm up - Major Scales - Free jamming - Minor scales - Riffs
from songs you like

...and so on.

The point is to stick to the plan every day until you've
mastered the topics. Play slowly and cleanly and with the use of
a metronome if possible.

Resist the urge to want to play fast too soon. It will come with
time, but you'll become 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.





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