Effective Guitar Practice: Maximise Results for Your Playing
Practice makes perfect!
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Effective Guitar Practice: Maximise Results for Your Playing · Source: John Kiss / Alamy Stock Photo
Effective guitar practice is essential for levelling up as a guitar player. Working hard, or hardly working? Let’s look at better ways to improve.
Effective Guitar Practice
Effective Guitar Practice: Where to start?
Most people hear the term guitar practice and want to run away and hide. I know that for a lot of younger learners, the last thing they want to do is work on their guitar playing. However, it doesn’t have to be that bad.
Whether you’re a child or an adult, there are plenty of ways that you can practice your guitar quickly and effectively without getting bored. Just take some of these tips and tricks for 10-20 minutes each day, and the progress will start to creep in.
Here, this guide will focus on helping new players. Or, guitarist who have a few months under their belt but are looking to become more studious with their playing. Let’s take a look.
Spider Exercise
In our first look at effective guitar practice, we’re back with the good old spider exercise. Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with our eight-legged frenemies. Here, we’ll be using TAB to understand this technique. If this is new to you, don’t worry! We have a simple guide here at gearnews.
So, what is this? Well, essentially, we’ll be playing one note, on each finger of your fretting hand, across four chosen frets. With this example, we’re starting at the 3rd fret on the low E string. We want to start with our index finger, before progressing to our middle, ring and pinkie fingers.
Once we’ve played each of these four frets on each of the six strings, we can work our way back up again in reverse order. Overall, this is a great way to get your fingers used to playing notes on the guitar. Furthermore, it will help with finger dexterity, timing and discipline for your future practice sessions.
Scales
Let’s say that you’re getting a bit bored of the spider exercise, which is fair enough! Let’s make this single-note exercise a bit more musical. The perfect way to do that is with a scale. A series of organised pitches.
Again, working with TAB, we’ve got the Am and Cm pentatonic scales. I’ve chosen these two specifically for two reasons: Am is pretty much in the middle of the fretboard and is therefore easier to reach all of the notes. Furthermore, Cm is that little bit higher, providing our ears and fingers with a refreshing change, and it highlights that we can play different scales, with the same shapes.
The same with the spider exercise, we want to work our way up and down the scales. From here, we can start to integrate some right-hand techniques, such as alternate picking. I know it seems slow and steady, but exercises like this will set up strong foundations for riffs and songs that you’ll learn down the line.
Chord Practice
We’ve got single notes covered, but what about chords? Chords and the building blocks of songs and are an essential part of learning the guitar. This exercise is more homemade and less scientifically proven, but the results speak for themselves…
This time, I’ve selected a combination of chords that a lot of my students report as being difficult to change to. As a beginner, making a chord is fine, remembering that chord is doable, but then changing to another chord entirely is a different story. Let’s fix that!
I’d like us to work through each example, playing four downstrokes on each chord, before taking our time to change to the next one. With example one, we’d play four strums on C, before changing to G, then back to G, etc.
Feel free to mix things up, add some alternate strums, strumming patterns and of course different chords! Why is this helpful? Because, instead of rushing into trying to play that song you’ve been learning for weeks, this is a side project that will help your chord changes across the board. Stress-free, and at your own pace.
Slowing Things Down
Speaking of rushing, this is something that we’re all guilty of. Searching for the TABs, finding the chord progression, trying to play it at full speed straight away. Sound familiar? Yep, me too.
This is where we can save ourselves some time and frustration. Whatever it is you’re trying to practice, scale it down to something small and slow. Let’s say you’re learning a cool intro to a song. Initially, just work on one or two bars/phrases at a time. Eventually, you can start to add more and more of the riff. Better this than overwhelming yourself with the whole thing.
Another way that we can slow things down effectively is to use a metronome. Although deemed as a more classical approach, using a metronome is a great way to improve your rhythms and track your progress. Today, that intro riff might be at 70bpm, but next week it could be at 100bpm or more. Take your time to learn your project properly, and gradually bring it up to speed.
The best way to find one is through a quick Google search, but if, like me, you’re a bit old-fashioned, you can find a couple of *metronomes over at Thomann:
Down Time
Concluding our look at effective guitar practice is something that’s really only going to help your morale and positive attitude towards playing the guitar.
If you’ve been working hard on learning one specific song that keeps getting the better of you, feel free to put it down and leave it alone for a short while. During this downtime, play something that you enjoy and can play with ease.
By having this break, you’re still technically practising the guitar, because every little helps, but you’re benefiting from the fruits of your labour. Okay, so you might not be stretching yourself by playing a previously learnt easier piece, but you’ll be enjoying playing. That’s what counts.
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