How To Improve Your Guitar Playing With Less Practice Time

How To Improve Your Guitar Playing With Less Practice Time

By Tom Hess

You don't need to practice many hours per day to get better at guitar. These are three ways to improve your playing while practicing less:

Plan Your Practice Schedule Ahead Of Time

Figuring out the things you want to practice moments before you grab your instrument to get started ends up wasting time (you spend time thinking about what to practice rather than actually practicing). Thinking about what you want to practice ahead of time helps you come up with a plan of which items need to be worked on to help you reach your goals as fast as possible. From there, you just need to sit down and do what you planned. This also helps prevent mindless practice or noodling that happens when you aren’t sure what to do.

Work On Things That Improve Many Skills At Once

Some guitar practice items make more sense to practice than others when you have limited time.  For instance, if you use your time to work on moving from one open chord to the next, you don't improve the same skills that comes with practicing improvising with scales does. With limited time, it becomes important to focus on the things that help you improve your overall playing as much as possible.

Review the practice items you want to work on and figure out which ones improve the most skills at once, plus which ones help you achieve your musical goals the fastest. Then you know which items to create your practice schedule around.

Track Your Practice Effectiveness Consistently

Don't just practice and hope that what you are working on will help you get better. Track the results you are getting each week to find out which items are helping you and which ones are not. Tracking your progress every week also identifies which aspects of your playing are strong and weak so you don't need to waste time practicing things you’ve already mastered.

Using all of these ideas in your guitar practice approach helps you make a lot of progress no matter how much time you practice each day.

However, there are a lot of other ways to improve your guitar practice efficiency. Study the ideas in this article about an effective guitar practice method to learn more ways to improve your guitar playing skills in no time.