How to Practise Guitar (Without Wasting Your Time)

There is a difference between playing guitar and practising guitar. Playing is enjoyable and you should do plenty of it. Practising is what makes you better, and it looks quite different.

The most common mistake I see is the beginner who sits down, plays the three songs they already know, and gets up half an hour later having improved by nothing at all.

A twenty-minute routine that works

Five minutes: warm up and technique. Simple finger exercises up and down the neck. This is not glamorous, but it wakes the hands up and it is where clean fretting comes from.

Ten minutes: the hard thing. Pick the one specific problem you currently have — a chord change you fumble, a barre chord that buzzes, a strumming pattern you cannot keep steady — and work on only that. Slow it right down until it is clean, then speed it up gradually.

Five minutes: play music. Finish with a song you enjoy. This is the reward, and it is also what reminds you why you are doing the other fifteen minutes.

The habits that hold beginners back

• Practising too fast. If you cannot play it slowly and cleanly, you cannot play it. Speed is a by-product of accuracy, never the other way round.
• Never using a metronome. Timing is the single most noticeable difference between someone who sounds like a beginner and someone who does not. It is also the easiest thing to fix.
• Stopping every time you make a mistake. Play through it. Constantly restarting teaches you to play the first two bars beautifully and nothing else.
• Only practising sitting down. If you ever want to play standing, practise standing sometimes. The hand angles are genuinely different.

Little and often

Twenty minutes a day beats two hours at the weekend, and it is not close. Muscle memory is built through frequent repetition, and the gaps between sessions are when the consolidation happens.

If you can only manage ten minutes on a given day, do the ten minutes. The habit is worth more than the duration.

Leave the guitar out

The single most effective trick I know: keep your guitar on a stand in the room you spend time in, not in its case under the bed. The number of people who practise more simply because the instrument is within arm's reach is remarkable.