Test Your Guitar Playing Skills & Practice Guitar More Effectively

By Tom Hess

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Want to get better guitar playing skills? There are many myths about how to play and practice guitar that slow down your guitar playing progress.

To learn what myths that can hurt your guitar playing, take the test below to see if you are on track to reach your guitar playing goals.

Question #1: What improves your guitar speed the most?

1. Practice guitar to a metronome every day, starting at a slow tempo and gradually getting faster.
    
2. Use the right guitar speed exercises that make you play faster.
    
3. Time, patience and perseverance.
    
4. Better guitar playing technique fundamentals

When you practice guitar with a metronome it tests your guitar speed…it does NOT develop it. Guitar speed is a byproduct of mastering guitar playing technique fundamentals.

Practicing over and over with sloppy guitar playing skills makes better guitar playing impossible at fast speeds.

Want a step-by-step guide to doubling your guitar speed? Download this guitar speed guide to learn how to get better guitar playing skills than ever before.

 

Question #2: Which approach helps you reach your guitar playing goals most quickly?

1. Learning from as many sources as possible to become a well-rounded guitar player.
    
2. Being self-taught, so you can develop your own original style as a guitar player.
    
3. Learning from one proven source, to take the shortest path towards your guitar playing goals.

Learning from too many sources hurts your guitar playing progress (even if those sources are good). Here is why:

• You learn things out of order. The order in which you learn new things is very important. Learning the right things in the wrong order makes it hard for you to apply and use what you are learning.
   
• You become overwhelmed from being exposed to too much information. This feeling of overwhelm makes you less motivated to practice guitar. It becomes easier to learn the next new thing than to actually practice guitar correctly and get better guitar playing skills.
   
• Randomized learning makes it hard to focus on specific guitar playing goals. It also makes it hard to track your guitar playing progress. You never really know how good you are and what to do next to get where you want to go.

These problems slow down your guitar playing progress and make you frustrated.

Being self-taught hurts your guitar playing progress in similar ways as learning from lots of different sources.

Self-taught guitar players usually don't know what to focus on, when to focus on it, why to practice one thing over another and how to train themselves to reach their guitar playing goals.

You get better guitar playing skills fast when you focus like a laser on learning from a single proven source. This keeps you on a straight path towards your guitar playing goals.

Question #3: What is the best picking technique for playing scales on guitar?

1. Alternate picking
    
2. Directional picking
    
3. Economy picking
    
4. There is no best technique, they all work equally well.

Many guitarists think that all picking techniques are equally useful. This is false. Some picking techniques are objectively better than others. The better guitar playing technique in this case: directional picking.

This video shows how to correctly train directional picking to get better guitar playing skills:
 

 

Question #4: What should you do when you feel overwhelmed as you practice guitar?

1. Stop practicing for awhile to give yourself a mental break
    
2. Push yourself to learn even more and become more disciplined
    
3. Practice guitar by integrating your skills together

Taking extended breaks from practicing guitar doesn't help you progress. It only wastes time you could use to get better guitar playing skills.

You can get better guitar playing skills without ever taking extended breaks from practicing. You also don’t need a huge amount of discipline to consistently practice guitar. You need to balance learning new things and integrating them with previsouly mastered skills to get better guitar playing skills fast. This allows you to make regular guitar playing progress and avoid overwhelm.

This video explains what it means to integrate your guitar playing skills together:

 

Question #5: What is the fastest way to master fretboard visualization for guitar solos?

1. Memorize all the notes on the guitar fretboard
    
2. Master a single scale all over the fretboard
    
3. Learn as many new scales as possible
    
4. Learn lots of new guitar licks from guitar players in many different styles

Fretboard visualization is the ability to play and improvise in any area of the guitar neck.

Memorizing note names on guitar does not improve your fretboard visualization. Note names don’t help you visualize scale patterns and stay in key during a guitar solo.

Mastering a single scale all over the guitar helps your fretboard visualization the most. When you see the guitar neck as ONE interconnected scale shape, improvising guitar solos becomes easy.
 

Question #6: What is the best system for learning how scales work when you practice guitar?

1. The CAGED system
    
2. 3-notes-per-string system
    
3. Both A and B
    
4. There is no best system. The more systems you know, the better.

Mastering scales the right way help you create awesome guitar solos, write cool songs and get better guitar playing skills.

Not all guitar playing scale systems are created equal.

You need a system that:

• Makes scales simple to learn and master
   
• Is logical, consistent and intuitive
   
• Applies to all scales, not just some scales
   
• Doesn't limit your guitar playing skills, technique and speed
   
• Is proven to help thousands of people to master the guitar

The 3-note-per-string scale system is such a system.

The CAGED system is confusing, incomplete and inconsistent. It makes guitar playing harder, limits your guitar speed and creates many problems for your guitar playing skills.

You now know the most common guitar playing myths that slow down your progress. The next step to becoming a better guitarist is to master your guitar playing technique, so you can play guitar as fast and as clean as you want. Download this free guitar speed eGuide & learn how to impress yourself and your friends with better guitar playing.

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About Tom Hess: Tom Hess is a guitar teacher, music career mentor and guitar teacher trainer. He teaches rock guitar lessons online to students from all over the world and conducts instructional live guitar training events attended by musicians from over 50 countries.

Get better guitar playing skills fast with proven online lessons for rock guitar.