Great Ways on How to Practice Guitar

8 min readSep 25, 2022

Habits for Learning Guitar

We all know how much discipline it takes to lose weight, and sticking to a plan. Even when you’re having success, and the passion is still there, the temptation to take days off when you know you should work out is still there. Learning guitar, or any instrument is just the same. You HAVE to develop great discipline habits to get really good and make it look easy. So, what are some of those habits on how to practice guitar.

How do you plan your guitar practice routine?
Where should you focus in your routine?
How long should you practice guitar, and how often?
What guitar skills do you practice, and at what point in your development do you practice those skills?
How do you practice those guitar skills?

If you follow guidelines like this closely you won’t waste near as much time practicing guitar, and the time you spend will be much more rewarding.

Practicing Guitar with a FOCUS

Mind you, FOCUS is the key. While it’s not a crime to handle or play with your instrument while watching TV, but don’t label that as guitar practice. Take at least 1 hour, no more than 2 at one sitting, of working on one skill goal. Reading about guitars isn’t practice either. Here’s what your focus should reward you with. You don’t have to be the best at every skill, but you should be good enough that none of them lose an audition for you.

Another crucial aspect to develop practicing guitar is pushing your comfort zone. It’s OK to warm-up for maybe 15 mins on scales using arpeggios you already know. However, after that work on scales (or whatever it is) you DON’T know using arpeggios you know. Then, try arpeggios you don’t know, and sight read them. For example, if you’re working on a tough tune don’t always start from the beginning that you know perfectly well (unless that’s the part you DON’T know). Go straight to the beat/notes where you’re having trouble. Then, expand out 1 beat on either side of that beat so you can transition cleanly through the tough spot. Find the next tough spot, and do the same thing. Spend a good, LONG hour doing that, then, put your axe down for the day. Likely, when you come back the next day you’ll be able to breeze through it like hot butter.

A general word about reading music:

If I had a dime for every musician I’ve heard say “I don’t need to learn how to read. This So-and-So star, and that star didn’t know how to read, and look at them.”, I’d never have to play another gig. But I can guarantee you that most of those stars WISHED they could read. And certainly, NOT ONE musician that knows how to read EVER said it was a waste of time to learn. The best ones in the world that probably did tons of session work before you ever heard of them. They will definitely tell you that knowing how to read put a WHOLE LOT more cash in their pockets than NOT knowing how. Besides, knowing how to read music, just like knowing how to read the written word, gives you so much more flexibility in knowing how to simply communicate. GET OVER IT AND LEARN!

Next Level Goals for Practicing Guitar

Here’s another set of goals for learning guitar to set your mind to reaching them. Since this blog is dedicated to making yourself marketable and/or credible, let’s say you pick the 3–4 hottest guitarists in your town that you most admire. You want them to be from bands of fairly different styles because knowing different styles will prepare you for greater hiring opportunities.

So, pick those 3–4 guitarists, or bands, and get their set list. You can probably write down your favorite Top 10 tunes for each band you’ve heard them play (without duplicating any).
Now, a great lesson I learned when I first got out on the road was the following: If you really like how a musician plays and want to play like them, don’t imitate THEM, find out who THEY idolized, and imitate THEM, then imitate THEIR idols. Here’s where YouTube.com and maybe Wikipedia is your best friend. You never know how little nuggets of trivia will influence your playing. True, it’s not a substitute for practice, but you can’t practice ALL the time.
So, now that you’ve researched the guitarists that played on the original recordings of those Top 30–40 songs, and you’re way inspired. Now, find a LEGAL way to download those original recordings, with the best chord charts, and/or tabs you can find. If you can afford it there are some DAWs, or single utilities that can convert a .wav to .mid file so you can get the notes, and possibly print them. You might have to compare the .mid file to the chord charts you found if there’s some discrepancy in the charts you have. A very worthy investment is a membership here. Also, Band-in-a-Box is a great theory resource as well with several price points. (I do NOT collect ANY commissions from those links.)
So, once you have all of the above from #3, the next step is figuring out what key they’re in. Oh! And I know sometimes this can be challenging for guitarists, but understand the time signature as well. Something else about getting your rhythm chops down. It will be wise to learn very well the rhythm guitar part first. The reason for this is that it will re-enforce your ability to improvise your lead more effectively off the rhythm part.
Once you do that, figure out which are the easiest keys. Let’s say anything with 1–2 sharps or flats qualify as easy. 3–4 qualify as intermediate, and 5 is TUFF!
Pick the first 5 tunes with those easy keys, and start learning the scales for those keys. Learning the scales will not only help you with developing your lead guitar skills, but also with chords.
If you seem to be running up against particular skills that these songs routinely use (pitch bends for example) then make a quick search on the web for the best resources for learning those skills.

At this point, you can begin to plot out your guitar practice routine.

Getting the Tuff Licks Down Pat

One way to practice your skill sets is after listening to those first 5–6 songs, make a list of all the difficult techniques that you can practice in general. Meaning, if it’s pitch bends, find a resource that drills you every way to Sunday on pitch bends. Then, try to tackle those songs. This is where videos come in so handy, even better that photos. Heck, with YT you can even file, and archive them for easy reference later.

While you’re in this short phase, you might try practicing that technique for 1 hour, then later that day, come back and work on the scales for that song using all sorts of challenging arpeggios. Here’s a great resource for all of your practice routines.

Tik-Toc, Tik-Toc…Where Does it Go?

Budgeting your time is critical in developing your skill set. If you can learn how to budget your time within reasonable deadlines this can greatly benefit you down the line. Ultimately, if you’re a session player, time is very expensive, and if you can learn your parts in a hurry, that habit will surely be passed around by your peers as being quite dependable and professional.

So, the objective here is give yourself enough time to concentrate on a particular skill set to really learn it, but don’t spread yourself too thin that you try a bunch of skill sets at once, but fail to learn any really well. And when you’re comfortable with a skill set, move on to the next one.

Usually, spending a month on any given skill set is a pretty good rule of thumb. So, you might consider setting a few small goals for yourself and plot out maybe three months of skills to learn really well. And if at the end of a particular month you feel like you haven’t gotten comfortable enough with that skill, spend another hard week on it, then move on. As you go through the next month, take 15 mins. once per week, or so, and go back to that skill, and tweak it a little bit more until you’re really comfortable. This way you can keep up with your goals, and brush up on previous trouble spots.

Getting the Raw Fundamentals Out of the Gate

So, before you come out trying to make fun of Clapton, let’s take a few laps around the track. For instance, let’s learn how fret your neck with clean moves, and without looking at your picking hand. Pick some basic open chords like I, IV, V (C, F, G) and go back and forth, reverse, and sideways to Sunday. Do it for all of the keys with up to 2 sharps/flats until you’re comfortable with it. Spend a good 15 mins per key. That will take you right at 1 hour. Here’s an illustration of that exercise.

This exercise will provide the following benefits:

Strengthening the tiny finger muscles in your fretting hand, which will also build confidence in that skill.
Strengthening those muscles will also build nimbleness and mastery over that skill.
Finally, coordination between your hands learning those skills.3.

Hopefully, by the end of 6 months you only have to spend 5–10 mins/day on these skills. Of course, you always want to be making them more challenging. For instance, adding sharps/flats, adding two more chords to the progression and discover what different progressions sound like. This ear-training skill will be invaluable when figuring out the parts to those songs you want to learn. Also, don’t forget rhythm. You’ll probably find that there are as many online courses for this skill as there strumming patterns.

The Difference Between Beginner & Advanced Routines

In closing, there’s probably going to be a good year, maybe two between your beginner stage, and advanced stage, but if you’re disciplined the only thing that should change is the material you’re rehearsing. Remember, the beginner stage is created for two reasons: 1. To learn the basics of course. But 2. to learn HOW to practice in the first place. So, at the advanced stage, if you’ve properly taught yourself how to get all those skill sets under your belt, and you practice consistently you’ll do fine. Remember this list:

Figure out what you want to play. Plot out the keys and timing.
What skill sets do those particular songs require. What kinds of chord changes, bends, barre chords, etc.
Discover exercises on the internet for those specific skills. There’s dozens of free resources. Or go on CraigsList in your area and start a small equally talented and developed group just for practice, and create your own live forum. This is a unique opportunity for guitarists since your instrument is so mobile.
Then, execute your routine. Make little goals of skill sets to achieve in small chunks of time, and push yourself to get through them.