Guitar Practice
How important is it to practice your guitar? Practice is the pinnacle for success at playing the guitar. Guitar is something that takes a massive amount of repetition to develop the muscle memory needed to run through scales and playing chord progressions. When learning new scales, chords, or songs the study process is like any other skill. In this blog, I want to go over the starting point of developing a practice routine that will be beneficial and give the results desired. For the serious player or for the casual player, these practice routine ideas will be extremely helpful.
The first thing you want to do is organize. Organization is the one of the main keys to prosper in many facets of life such as project completion, job successfulness, and business management. The simplest way to incorporate organization in learning how to play the guitar is to create a check off list of different warm ups, scales, chord progressions and songs. This check off list will help with time management, will be visually appealing, and will help to keep progress of all your hard work.
Becoming a guitarist is a unique skill that requires a lot of practice. One of my favorite rules that I find holds true is the 10,000-hour rule. This rule means that to excel at anything, you must practice it for 10,000 hours. In addition to the 10,000-hour rule I live by the saying, “with consistency and persistency; anything is possible.” To get better at guitar there must be a consistent amount of times a day, week, month, and year one must practice.
If you are beginning your guitar journey I recommend at least 30 minutes a day for 5 days a week. To help with this I recommend creating a daily routine. An example of a great routine for a student may look something like this. The student may come home from school, feed the dog, do their homework, practice their guitar, and then play with their friends. This helps with consistency and keeping the guitar player engaged on a daily basis. After a while the student can then commit to more practice time as desired, but having developed that daily work ethic is key.
Last, but certainly not least, is focus. Focusing on the plan and each item on the list and making sure to invest a good amount of time into each individual item is the first example of focus, the second example is to give undivided attention to the practice time. Which means no watching T.V. and practicing guitar. (LOL) Having 100% focus on the practice time is key to making sure each exercise, scale, or song is being embedded into the brain and it also ensures proper development of the muscle memory needed to succeed. Following my steps to successful guitar practice will ensure that the student has an organized plan of practice that is a part of their daily activities that will keep them focused on their goals.
Developing a solid practice routine is by far one of the most important elements in progressing at the guitar, and make a plan and work the plan.First, creating a list of different warm ups, scales, chord progression, and songs on a checklist. This is an example of organization skills, and like anything that a person wants to see prosper like a project, job, or business needs to be written out to visually see and can keep records of the progress. Also, this will help with time management because most of us live busy lives so every minute counts.
Guitar is the type of activity that requires a lot of practice, and I always talk about the 10,000-hour rule. This rule means that if you want to be good at anything, you must practice for 10,000-hours. Second, “with consistency and persistency anything is possible.”