Common Guitar Practice Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Working hard or hardly working?
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Common Guitar Practice Mistakes and How to Fix Them · Source: Pramote Soongkitboon / Alamy Stock Photo
Guitar practice mistakes can totally derail your learning experience. Getting the basics right is essential for moving forward. Let’s fix that.
This guitar workshop is aimed at beginner to intermediate players. Looking at common errors players make whilst learning the guitar, here’s how to streamline and fix the process.
Key Information about Guitar Practice
- Setting practice time targets leads to faster improvement and more efficient guitar playing. Utilise your time to the best that you can.
- Don’t ignore small mistakes! Repeating errors at trains muscle memory and leads to other problems. Put the work in now while you can, before it’s too late.
- Take your time and don’t rush. If you’re a beginner, you will get there. Even if you’re more accomplished, there is still time to nail the solo that you’re working on.
Improving Your Guitar Practice
How do you practice?
This all depends on where you’re at as a guitarist. But the skills are pretty much all the same. Are you still getting your first few chords together? What about learning your first solo? Or maybe that tremolo picking is proving quite difficult.
There are so many areas for guitarists to improve on, regardless of where you’re at in your playing journey. Here, we’re looking at maximising the efficiency and strength of your practice time. Within that, ironing out common practice mistakes is key.
Let’s check out what people innocently get wrong, and how to sort it going forward.
Tones
As a guitar teacher, there is one thing that stands out the most while people are learning the guitar. More often than not, players set their amps to DEFCON 1 before they can play what they’re learning.
Why are guitar tones important for guitar practice? Playing with a clean tone allows guitar players to hear their mistakes, as digital effects such as distortion and delay can often mask and flatter a player. Don’t get me wrong, flattery is fine, but only once you know what you’re doing.
Now, I know how tempting it can be. If you’re looking at a guitar part that sounds wrong without the flanger, you want it all! But trust me, work through it a couple of times with that natural clean tone. This will help you hear and appreciate the riff for what it is. From here, you can start cranking things up.
Timing
Another common guitar practice mistake is related to rhythm and timing. Some people have natural timing; others don’t. Either way, there are lessons to be learnt from timing.
Chord changes can be tricky as a beginner. The best way to practice these is with a metronome or a drum machine. Such devices will allow you to place your chords on the correct beats, giving you the right amount of time to play through your chords.
Something else to think about is the timing of lead lines. A lot of riffs and solos contain delicate nuances that have to be observed. If you ever reach the end of a passage before the record, you’ll know that you’ve rushed somewhere. But more on how to avoid this later.
Speed
Moving on to timing, next we’ll be looking at the speed of your backing tracks. This is where a lot of players could save themselves hours of practice time.
Let’s say that you’ve already put in a lot of hard work learning a certain song acoustically. Now, it’s time for you to play it along with the backing track. Chances are, the track is too fast for you right now, and this can feel demotivating. But we can turn this into a positive!
Video playback sites such as YouTube allow you to slow down whatever you’re watching and or listening to. How does this help with your guitar practice? Slow the track down to something achievable, like 85% speed. From here, you can set your progress based on the speed of the track.
This week, you may be able to play the track at 90% speed, but that’s great! Because last week you were at 80%. Slowing things down and then speeding them up as you improve is a great way to gauge progress with your guitar practice. Clear reminders of how far you’ve come are great for your confidence.
Context
Remember looking at timing? Time to finish off that little chapter. What do I mean by context when it comes to guitar practice? Essentially, when learning anything on guitar, you need to have a good idea of what you’re aiming for. Whereby, you know the song inside out.
Something I see quite often is when players fabricate their own version of a guitar riff. There isn’t anything uncommon or unusual in this; it’s just where your brain fills in the blanks. We’ve all done it where we’ve practised a riff wrong but assumed that it’s right.
Sure, the TABs are great. But I think that the best way to truly learn something accurately is by getting to know the song properly, outside of playing. If you can hum or whistle the piece that you’re working on then you’ll have more of a chance getting it under your fingers.
Recording Progress
Concluding our look at guitar practice mistakes and how to fix them, we’re going to use a device that we use every day without even thinking. Here’s how your mobile phone can help with your guitar playing. Crazy, right?
We live in an age where anybody can be a TV presenter, podcast host, or internet personality. Why? Because it’s now easier than ever to record and upload media content.
Therefore, I strongly encourage players to record themselves playing and practising guitar. We all go through rough patches, so this is something that can help with that. If you record yourself today and look back in 6 months’ time, you’ll see how much progress you’ve made. From here, you can set new and realistic goals to help your future self.
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