Learn How To Get More Results When You Practice Guitar
You make faster progress in your guitar playing when you practice with a high rate of transferability.
This means what you practice incorporates many different skills at once. When you know which practice items have the highest transferability, you know what to practice to get the most results from your time.
Watch the guitar video below and find out how to get more results from your practice time:
Click on the video to begin watching it.
How To Practice Guitar To Make Your Fast Guitar Playing Tighter
Problem:
Sometimes playing guitar at fast speeds leads to playing a little too early or late on the beat. This has the potential to ruin a perfectly good guitar lick or solo by making it sound sloppy.
Don't worry though, this is a common (very fixable) problem.
What is the solution?
Practice your rhythmic timing more often. Timing is an often overlooked musical skill by guitar players. However, it is very important – especially if you want to perform music in bands, with other musicians or in professional recording sessions.
Here’s what to practice to get better:
Get started by turning on your metronome to a slower tempo.
Then record yourself using your phone or musical apps so you can listen back and get feedback on your performance.
Practice this for extra benefit by playing off beat (on purpose) and listening to how it sounds.
Do this continuously for a few repeats, then slowly start playing in perfect time.
Use just 1-3 notes to practice this at first. Using a few notes versus a lot makes it easier to focus on get the most out of your work.
Note: Use very simple amp settings while doing this. Nothing besides basic distortion settings.
Why? Because your mistakes become obscured when you can’t hear them under various effects or noises.
The Importance Of Focus During Guitar Practice
One of the essential requirements for having good guitar practice technique is to practice with intense focus.
Chances are, you have practiced guitar at one time or another in a state of auto-pilot.
In other words, your guitar practice technique was to treat practice more like a series of automatic movements than the actual act of improving and developing your guitar playing.
In order to get great results from your guitar practice, you must change your mind set. Instead of practicing guitar to merely achieve the right movements, work on paying close attention to what you are doing while keeping in mind exactly what it is that you are trying to accomplish.
This may sound obvious, but think about it - if you are trying to play a scale faster but treat the task as mere repetition your mind may wander and you will not get as much out of it.
However, if you actually think about how you can improve your speed actively as you are playing, it will be much easier for you to pinpoint trouble areas and correct them in a shorter period of time.
Why Do Some Guitarists Seem To Get Better Faster With Their Practice Approach?
Have you ever noticed that some guitar players seem to get better guitar practice results even though they do not practice as much as other guitarists?
It is a myth that simply practicing more on its own will make you a great guitar player; even though this is a popular belief amongst most guitarists.
Fact is, you can accomplish a lot more with your guitar practice in a short period of time by applying a little-known guitar practice secret.
In fact, this secret is not only applicable to your guitar playing, but to anything else in your life!
What is it?:
The 80/20 rule, also known as “Pareto’s Principle.”
The basic idea of this principle is that 80% of the time you spend practicing guitar will give you about 20% of your total progress, while 20% of the time you spend practicing guitar will give you about 80% of your total progress.
Best Guitar Practice Approach - Lessons With A Teacher Or Self-Taught?
The majority of guitarists eventually come to this fork in the road.
So, do guitarists really need to take lessons with a teacher, or does this limit their ability to learn creatively and faster?
Answer:
Taking guitar lessons is 100% the choice any serious guitar player should make if they want to get better much faster.
Why?
It's simple, really.
You make significantly more progress in your guitar playing by taking lessons with an experienced teacher who has already helped others achieve your goals than you would by guessing your way through the process.
Why exactly does a guitar teacher make things easier or help you get better faster?
There are many potential points to make here, but one of the biggest ones is that a guitar teacher takes a student's goals and gives them the exact path needed to reach them. This cuts down on all the guesswork, so the student only needs to do what the teacher says to get better really quickly.
Not sure about which notes to use while soloing over an Em7b9 chord?
Not able to play that one cool guitar lick at 175 bpm without breaking down?
Not sure how to make your guitar solos sound more musical?
Wish you knew what, how and when to practice to make as much progress as possible in as little time as possible?
These are the kinds of things that guitar teachers are perfect for.
That said:
One of the most overlooked aspects of havign a guitar teacher is that not only do they show you new ways to do things that you never thought of, but they help you stay motivated and excited throughout the learning process. This makes practicing more fun than it would be on your own.
If you're on the fence, go ahead and get started taking guitar lessons. Your future self will thank you!
The longer you wait, the longer your guitar playing remains at a lower level than where you want it to be.
Begin taking lessons today and make amazing progress in your guitar playing.
These are just a few cases my students’ incredible progress from taking guitar lessons:
“I just love guitar lessons with Tom, he literally takes the time to make a specific lesson plan and sends you lessons as you need it.”
My last lesson I took with a local guitar teacher before joining Tom, I was struggling with a sweep picking pattern, which was the 5 string root major, I was really struggling to get the rolling technique down. I took it to my guitar teacher and I was like “Help me with this, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.” This is his exact phrase: “At high speeds, it doesn’t really matter if you can play it clean or not, no one can hear it anyway.” At that point, I was just like, “Ah man.” But thankfully, in that same message, he mentioned Tom’s name. Then the doors opened. That very night, I went home and looked at every single lesson Tom had, had my guitar in hand, every YouTube lesson on you know “correct motions”, “play this over chords”... just applied it instantly, and it was instant results within an hour... just from his free stuff. I was like, oh man, I’ve got to do lessons with this guy.
I remember when I first started out with lessons, I instantly jumped on the forum to greet myself, and it’s amazing how there’s like 30 responses. Just like, “Hi welcome.” and stuff... “Hi Dan, great musical tastes”. That made me feel really at home and welcomed into Tom’s forum and community. Every time I’ve had an issue when I was first starting out be it like theory or technique, there’s always been someone there who’s helped. Otherwise it could’ve been this potentially awkward process where I’d have to wait a whole week to get an answer from my teacher, who even then may not have answered it correctly and may have never solved it. Whereas there are guys on there who have been with Tom and have been through exactly what I’ve been through. They know exactly how to help, in what order, what information you need... it’s just a friendly atmosphere really.
Dan Mayhew, Stowmarket, UK
“July of 2012, I had been managing in a retail store and was kind of reaching this point where I was really getting frustrated because I had been struggling to progress in my guitar playing. I had this mindset that I had to teach myself everything... you know and the best players are all self taught and stuff like that...”
...and I remembered Tom Hess from that book, and I said “You know, it’s time to look this guy up and see what he’s all about.” And it didn’t take me very long to figure out that this is the kind of person that I needed to get on board with.
My playing has definitely improved technique-wise, but probably the most important change I have experienced is just in my overall mindset as a player and as a practicing musician. I just feel like I have a much better frame of mind and a much better idea of where I am going and where my guitar practicing is taking me. Whereas before I just felt like I had to practice everything and I had a whole bunch of stuff going on. It’s a lot more focused now.
Being in the environment that Tom has created with his other students is incredibly motivating. I had always been in my own little shell, kind of just stayed on my own. Coming out here... like when I came out here last year was a big step out of my comfort zone. Getting around all these other musicians... it’s unbelievable how great some of these guys are, not just as players, but as people.
Andrew Tintle, Richmond, California USA
“Before I took lessons with Tom Hess, I wanted to learn how to do some sweep picking and I also wanted to fill in a few gaps that I thought I might’ve had in my playing. And also I was feeling a little bit frustrated with not knowing where to take my playing. I didn’t really know how to get better. I felt like I reached a plateau, so that’s why I sought out Tom.”
I’ve had a few other guitar teachers before I took lessons with Tom, and most of them weren’t very good. And after reading a few articles online that Tom had written, I could tell that this guy was going to be the teacher for me.
The biggest thing that I really like is the actual guitar lessons themselves. I’m finding that I’m learning new things that I never even considered every single time I get a lesson. Something new to apply to my playing each time. But of course, I really enjoy the forum as well, because thanks to the lessons with Tom, I’ve been able to meet people from all over the world who have similar experiences and similar goals, so that’s been really motivating as well.
Before I took lessons with Tom I really didn’t like improvisation. I knew scales, and I knew kind of how they applied over chord progressions, but I just didn’t like it. Since taking lessons with Tom, some of the lessons are focused on that specific issue, and now I feel really comfortable about getting up in front of people and playing over any type of… in any key any backing track, I feel pretty comfortable doing that.
Tom actually knows what my goals are and gives me specific lessons that will help me achieve those goals. Other teachers that I’ve had before just do it their way… it’s either their way or the highway. And they don’t really care about what I wanted to do, and they didn’t really listen, and they didn’t really look into what I was doing or what my interests were and didn’t really play into that.
It’s really motivating to get to know people who are also students of Tom. It’s really good to have positive-minded musicians around even if I’m just talking to them online, or if I meet them in person, either way it’s still really motivating.
The forum has helped me because I am able to ask any music theory related questions or technique questions and I get those answered very very quickly. And I also like to participate in discussions and help share my knowledge as well with other people, which when I do that I feel that it’s reinforcing the things that I know as well, so it helps with my music theory knowledge when I share as well.
Greg Trotter, Melbourne, Australia
Practicing effectively helps you get more results in a fraction of the time than you would by practicing in an unorganized manner.
Working with a great guitar teacher speeds this process up even more! Take lessons with a teacher right away by getting guitar instruction online.