The Beginner Guitarist’s Guide to Practicing
A blog about practicing, what to practice and when to practice.
The Beginner Guitarist’s Guide to Practicing: A blog about practicing, what to practice and when to practice.
There is a lot of advice floating around out there on the internet. It is easy to get confused or overwhelmed by it all.
Maybe you have been playing for a while, or maybe you are just starting out on guitar. Either way, the things that you need to do are going to be similar. However, depending on how much experience you have, the order in which you need to do these things might be different.
I am going to cover a very basic plan for what you should be doing with your time as a beginner. This is meant for those who have not played an instrument at all before and are new to music theory in general. If this describes you then this article will likely help!
This is a blog about practicing, what to practice and when to practice. It’s not really aimed at beginners, but more aimed at those who have been playing for a few years and feel like they are getting nowhere.
I’m just going to write this post without much planning. I would like it to be a guide of where my head is at when I’m approaching the guitar (or any instrument), and maybe you can learn something from it. First things first:
The best way to practice is: Slowly.
This is probably the most important thing for you to take away from this blog post, so I’ll say it again:
The best way to practice is slowly.
So you’ve decided to learn the guitar. There are a variety of reasons why people want to play the guitar, for fun, personal development or professionally. You may have always wanted to learn, but never had the time or opportunity. Perhaps you can see yourself on stage at a packed out arena playing power chords in front of 50,000 loyal fans. Or maybe you just want to be able to play your favourite songs when no one else is around. Whatever your reason for wanting to learn the guitar, it’s important that you know how to practice properly if you want to get better fast and eventually achieve your goal.
The first thing you need to do when learning any instrument is figure out what kind of guitar player you want to be. There are so many genres available that it’s hard not to get lost in them all and feel overwhelmed by choice. It’s best to pick one genre that interests you and try and emulate that style of guitarist as closely as possible, at least at the start. You will be able to develop your own unique style as time progresses but copying someone else’s will give you a good starting point and help you understand what a professional guitarists techniques are like.
At this point it’
One of the most common questions from aspiring guitarists is “how long should I practice in order to become good?” or “how long do I have to practice before I will be able to play x, y or z song?”.
Questions like these have no direct answer since there are no universal constants that apply to everyone in every situation. There are however a number of ways you can assess your own progress and thus determine whether you are practicing effectively.
In this post I am going to discuss some of the ways you can measure your progress on the guitar and how you can use this information to set goals and decide what to work on. The goal being that by having realistic expectations and setting clear goals you will be able to make the most out of your practice time and avoid frustration as much as possible.
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed when you’re first starting out on guitar. It seems like there are a million things you need to know and that everyone else already does. That’s where practice comes in.
The only way to get better is to keep practicing but, especially when you’re starting out, it can be hard to know what to focus on. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. If you want to become a great guitarist, you have to put in the time and effort.
The good news is that you don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing in order for it to be effective. Even if your practice seems aimless or disorganized, if you persist long enough and work hard enough, you will eventually improve.
One of the most common questions I get asked is, “How do I practice guitar?”
In general, guitarists are divided into two categories:
– Those who don’t practice at all.
– Those who practice too much.
In this article we’ll focus on the second group – those who practice too much. These are the guitarists who want to improve their skills, but don’t know how to properly execute their plan of action.
These are usually people who have been playing for a while, and have reached a point where they plateaued. They realize that if they keep playing the same songs over and over again, they will never improve. So they decide to set up specific goals in order to move forward.
They may start by deciding to learn ten new songs this month. By the end of the month, they realize that they didn’t even get through five songs. Then they decide to focus on learning only three songs next month. But at the end of the month, they only learned two songs…