What To Practice On Guitar When Your Guitar Practice Time Is Limited

by Tom Hess

When your guitar practice time is limited, here are 4 skills you can practice on guitar that can help you become a better guitarist (as long as you practice them correctly):

The #1 Guitar Technique Skill To Practice On Guitar When Guitar Practice Time Is Limited: String Skipping.


String skipping improves just about every area of your guitar technique (from your picking hand efficiency, fretting hand efficiency, 2-hand synchronization, string noise control, excess tension control and more).

So, even if you have just 5 minutes to spend with your guitar and are looking for the most time-efficient exercise to level-up your guitar technique, string skipping is a great choice.

Here is how to practice string skipping the right way:



The #1 Lead Guitar Skill To Practice On Guitar When Guitar Practice Time Is Limited: Phrasing And Vibrato


Nothing will make you sound more pro or improve your guitar playing sound faster than making your vibrato and phrasing sound better. 

Here are some great tips for practicing your phrasing and vibrato that help you make the best use of your guitar practice time:



The #1 Guitar Creativity Skill To Practice On Guitar When Guitar Practice Time Is Limited: Improvising


Improvising helps you tie your skills together and improve your guitar playing by learning to compose guitar solos faster and easier.

The key is to understand the difference between ‘improvising’ and practicing improvising... as the two are not the same.

Here is how to make best use of your guitar practice time when you want to improve your improvising:



The #1 Rhythm Guitar Skill To Practice On Guitar When Guitar Practice Time Is Limited: Timing


Playing guitar in time helps to make everything you play on guitar sound better.

To make your playing tighter, play to the metronome and concentrate on making the click disappear. This means: make sure the first note of every grouping of notes you play lines up perfectly with the click.

When that happens, you create an illusion that the click has disappeared. That is how you know that your guitar playing is truly in time.

And if you struggle to achieve this feeling in your guitar playing?

Practice simply clapping your hands to the click (to reproduce the rhythm you were trying to play on guitar). This helps you to lock in with the click more easily and then play just as tightly with the guitar in your hands. 

Now that you know what to practice on days your time is very limited... what should you do when you have more guitar practice time available?

On those days, you can include  other, more nuanced guitar practiced skills that improve your guitar playing  in other ways, such as 2-hand tapping. Check out this article that shows you how to practice 2-hand tapping the right way


Tom Hess
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.

Learn guitar from the best rock guitar tutor online.

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