Do you feel frustrated because your guitar playing progress is too slow? If you are like the vast majority of guitar players, you’re looking for the right things to do that will make you a better guitarist. However, you probably are NOT looking for the things that hurt your guitar playing (that you should avoid doing). Truth is, even if you never learn any new guitar exercises but simply stop doing the things that hurt your progress, you will become a great guitar player much faster.
The following are the nine things you need to avoid in order to become a better guitar player quickly:
1. Delaying Too Much Before You Begin Applying What You Learned
Application is the procedure of taking what you know and turning it into a skill. Any knowledge that you have is completely worthless if you can’t use it to create music. You will grow as a great guitar player much faster just by taking a break from constantly acquiring new knowledge and focusing on applying all that you currently know. Take this free mini course and learn how to reach all your guitar playing goals.
2. Delaying Too Much Before Integrating Your Skills Together
What most guitar players do is try to improve on guitar one skill at a time. While practicing guitar in a linear way is needed in some situations, you still need to efficiently blend many skills together to play fluently.
If you don’t integrate your skills together, your guitar playing skills become like individual computer parts. It is irrelevant how good each of these parts are, you don’t have an actual computer until the parts are gathered together in the right order.
Regardless of whether your other skills are at higher levels, not integrating your guitar skills makes you feel and play like a novice in the weaker areas of your guitar playing.
To prevent this from happening to you, learn how to integrate your guitar skills together and schedule a specific time for practicing this area of your guitar playing. Discover how you can do this by taking a look at this video about the best way to practice guitar.
3. Lacking Clear Goals For Each Guitar Practice Session
Many guitar players have set long-term goals. However, very few of them have set clear-cut, quantitative and rational “mini” goals for every time they practice guitar. These guitarist just keep practicing and hoping their daily practice will help them achieve their final goals. This pointless practice style is the main reason why most guitar players never become great. The best way to prevent this is by working with an expert guitar teacher, one who can lead you precisely towards your musical goals by showing you how and what you must practice.
4. Not Isolating Trouble Spots
“Practice makes perfect”, that is the favorite quote for most guitar players. Whenever they aren’t able to play a lick or technique, the only solution they find is to “keep practicing until you got it”, assuming this will solve their playing issues. Stop simply pushing harder and start identifying what the specific elements are that are giving you issues and isolate them. By doing so, you will be able to center on whatever is holding your guitar playing back, quickly eliminate it and become a better guitarist faster. Discover how to do this by watching this great video on how to play anything on guitar.
Note: Notice that building your guitar skills in isolation is very different from isolating a specific issue. By isolating a specific issue, you are practicing guitar effectively... while practicing guitar skills in isolation will ensure failure.
5. Not Implementing The Most Effective Guitar Practice Schedule
Here are two common myths believed by many guitar players:
Myth Number One: Effective guitar practice schedules have little effect on your guitar playing. This belief is incorrect. After teaching thousands of guitar students over the last three decades, I’ve discovered that an effective guitar practice schedule can make you improve 4 times faster than if you don’t use one at all.
Myth Number Two: Anyone can make their own practice schedule. This is also incorrect. You need to keep in mind that your guitar abilities don’t grow in a linear way. If you break down your practice sessions and allocate time uniformly for each item you’re going to practice, your overall guitar playing becomes unstable. This way you end up practicing too much on some items while not practicing enough on the ones that need it most.
Read this article and find out how you can start creating an effective guitar practice schedule.
6. Forgetting To Track Your Guitar Playing Progress
When you track your guitar playing progress your will be able to find your weaknesses and your strengths, doing so you will understand what is the precise next step to take to improve your guitar playing faster.
Most guitar players believe that tracking their guitar playing progress won’t make them better guitarists. “The only way of becoming a better guitarist is by practicing more”, they think. In fact, by just tracking your guitar playing progress you can achieve on average seventy two percent more results in comparison to those who don’t track their progress. In order to achieve this, you must track every single element of your guitar playing, not just “what you’ve practiced”, “what is your maximum speed” or “how many hours you practice”.
Take a look at this powerful tool for tracking every element of your guitar playing and speed up your guitar playing progress.
7. Emulating The Practice Routine Of Your Favorite Guitarists
It seems like common sense that if you practice like your favorite guitar players practice, you will develop your guitar skills just like them. In reality, doing this will only hurt your ability to play guitar and hold you back from achieving big results from every practice session. Every one of your favorite guitarists has totally different reasons for practicing what they practice (at the time they practice it) than you have. Guitar practice schedules that deliver the best results for them, usually will be pointless (or even risky) for you to follow.
If you really want to become a better guitar player faster, learn how to create guitar practice schedules tailored to your own musical needs, skill levels and goals.
8. Learning Guitar/Music From A Variety Of Sources
Another common (wrong) belief is that if you learn from many different sources, you are going to make faster progress. In reality, collecting a bunch of guitar playing knowledge will end up weakening your ability to play guitar, unless:
-The information is part of an efficient learning strategy tailored to your own guitar playing goals.
-The stream of new knowledge/lessons is stabilized by learning to blend your skills with each other and apply them.
-You have a deep understanding on how to practice anything you learn in the best way possible to make huge progress.
-Each source you are learning from is verified and proven to have helped many other guitar players achieve their musical goals.
Unless each of these components are present, beware of where you are learning things from to improve your guitar playing.
9. Learning From Inexperienced Guitar Teachers
Too many guitar players take advice from almost any guitarist who is more advanced than them. Truth is, having killer guitar playing skills is not the same as having the ability to teach someone how to develop better guitar playing skills. In addition, there is a distinction between a regular guitar teacher and a first-class guitar teacher, one who has taught thousands of students to become great guitarists. This is the main reason why you can’t evaluate a guitar teacher by how good his/her guitar playing skills are – you must judge a teacher by how good his students’ skills are.
An experienced guitar teacher is the only source you must learn from. Learning from random unexperienced guitar teachers will hurt your guitar playing progress and slow down your musical development.
You now know the nine things that damage your guitar playing and are able to tweak your practicing approaches to become a better guitarist much faster. To learn more, take a look at this great video about the most effective way to practice guitar.
About The Author: Tom Hess is an electric guitar teacher online, recording musician and a mentor for guitar teachers. He teaches electric guitar online lessons to guitar players around the world. On his website tomhess.net, you can find tools for guitar playing, and guitar playing articles.