No matter what your skill level at the guitar is, practice and performance can become very frustrating. You think you’re putting in a good amount of practice, but you still find you are making mistakes. Learning the skill of playing guitar requires learning how to practice, which is its very own skill. Poor practice habits can lead to inconsistency during performance. (“Inconsistency” is putting it nicely.) Through analyzing your practice sessions and being aware of what you can do to improve the process, you will find you make fewer mistakes on the guitar.
Practice Smarter, Not Harder
We all know the saying work smarter, not harder. These words are so important. In fact, every musician should have this on posters all over there house. With practicing, musicians can become obsessed with time spent practicing. There’s certainly nothing wrong with spending all day practicing, but if you’re not getting good, focused practice, it’s not worth nearly as much. Every note you play should have a purpose. Even when you’re just playing a song for fun – fun is a purpose right?
When I was in College, I had many problems with my left hand and wrist. Classical guitar is so demanding on the hands, and trying to maintain multiple hours a day of practice can get painful. During a period where my hand was really bothering me, my teacher told me to limit the amount I played each day to about an hour. That being said, I was still to get 4-5 hours of practice in.
The way to do this was to sit there with a stop watch. I would analyze the music, visualize the movements, ghost the passage on the guitar, and jot down some notes. Then I would hit the timer and play for maybe 5 minutes before going back to mental work. This was an excellent exercise in making practicing more of an intellectual exercise than it was a physical exercise.
To read further about advancing your playing, please read Strategies for Increasing your Skills on the Guitar.
The Double Error Reflex
A double error reflex is the act of immediately playing a note or group of notes again after making a mistake. Most of the time this is done automatically as the musician has developed a habit of trying to fix mistakes in this manner. Many of my students, beginners to advanced, end up working the bad habit of double error reflex in their practice. Fortunately I’m able to pick up on the fact that they are doing this at home and steer them in the right direction. The biggest issue with the double error reflex is it takes the focus away from momentum and consistency with the tempo. It can ultimately lead to more mistakes because the player isn’t focused on just getting the passage right.
Practice Performance vs. Passage Practice
The process to avoiding double error reflex requires you to identify what your intention is with the practice you are getting. If you are playing the song from beginning to end, this is a practice performance and the goal should be consistency of tempo. Of course, consistency of tempo can be very difficult if you are still getting familiar with the song or piece you are playing. Use this performance to decide what sections are causing you problems and need individual attention. Recording yourself is very helpful. This way you can take notes on your recording to see what needs to be improved on.
This is why “passage practice” is required. Think of each mistake as a pothole on a musical road. Each one needs to be filled in individually. If you make mistake, don’t go back to the beginning. Start at the beginning of the phrase or measure and spend 2-5 minutes correcting the mistake (or significantly longer depending on the difficulty of the phrase). This small period of time could permanently fix the mistake. Want an extra challenge? Set a goal for yourself. Play the phrase 10 times without mistake. If you mess up, the count goes back to one.
Take a Breath!
I tell this to my students all the time. In trying to master a phrase, many of them will start to play the phrase over and over again in a very compulsive manner. There will be no breaks between the repetitions, and most of these repetitions will be false starts. I can hear the playing becoming more and more tense as efforts to master the phrase become, well, frantic. My usual response in these scenarios is “Whoa! Hold on!” In away, this is like entering the section of the brain where the double error reflex resides.
My advice when I see this happening is always the same. Take a breath in between repetitions. Modify the depth of your breath depending on how frustrated you’re getting with what your playing. If you find you’re frantically trying to play a passage, take a long, deep breath to receive its calming benefits. Honestly, this is probably one of the best ways to assure you are getting focused practice. Each time you pause to take a breath you are allowing yourself to process what you are working on both physically and mentally. In this way, you are making practice more intellectual.
Building speed on the guitar can really be an uphill battle. It’s high maintenance, and sometimes hand tension seems to creep in long before your speed goals do. Perhaps you don’t like playing fast, but need to learn a faster tune for a gig quickly. There are right ways and wrong ways to develop speed on the guitar, so learning how to be relaxed while building speed in your fingertips is crucial.
My Story
When I was a young guitarist, I aspired to be the fastest guitarist in the land. I would spend hours a day practicing my favorite exercise and my metronome hardly got a rest. My hands were tense and my shoulders raised, yet the speed didn’t seem to come fast enough. My guitar would fall silent only when someone asked me that dreaded question:
“Hey! Do you know any songs?”
I finally got sick of not being able to answer this question, so I abandoned this practice to learn some real music. It was a great choice, both for my musical sanity and the safety of my hands. This didn’t mean I was able to abandon my practice of speed. I am always finding that I have to learn things where the speed of a passage is out of my reach, so it was crucial to develop an efficient routine.
Speed Bursts
Practicing scales and exercises at lightning fast speeds for extended periods of time will cause excess tension in both hands. The only way to be a truly efficient player at higher speeds is to be relaxed. Tension will tire your hands out quickly and it will make it close to impossible to stay in time.
The secret to building speed while reducing left and right hand tension? Speed Bursts!
(If you are already familiar with speed bursts, don’t give up on me just yet. My goal is to provide you with some insightful new information about speed bursts and how to get the most use out of them.)
So what are speed bursts? The name is pretty self explanatory. Speed bursts are short groups of notes followed by a short rest. They allow the right hand wrist and left hand fingers to get accustomed to the tempo without excess strain. With regular practice of speed bursts, it will become much easier to play the guitar with virtuosity. By developing this routine, difficult passages will be easier to master.
Developing a Speed Burst Routine
Let’s explore some speed burst variations with the A minor pentatonic scale as our example. The goal is to effortlessly play the scale at a fast tempo. This means the right and left hands are both relaxed the entire time. In order to play this correctly, please be sure to follow each step.
1. Learn to play the passage flawlessly at a very slow speed.
(If you’re interested in building your speed on the guitar, chances are you don’t need to spend any time getting the A minor pentatonic scale under your fingers. Regardless, this step is easily the most important, so pretend you’ve never played the scale before.) Whether you’re working on a new scale, a transcription of a John Coltrane solo, Yngwie Malmsteen style arpeggios, or a Bach fugue, there is absolutely no point in trying to build up speed if you don’t know have an intimate understanding of what you’re playing. If the passage is very long or particularly difficult, it is best to break it up into small segments (2/4/8 measures). When I say slow I mean obnoxiously slow. To practice this, play through the A minor pentatonic scale, half notes at 60 BPM. I have another post that talks more about the benefits of slow practice.
2. Practice bursts in groups of two.
Now we will start to break up the passage to really test how well you know it. This will also make problem areas more apparent. Sometimes, there are only one or two tricky maneuvers that will make it difficult to progress at something that is otherwise very simple. Set the metronome on 60 BPM (even if you know you can go a lot faster) and play the A minor pentatonic scale ascending and descending with a short-long-short-long pattern. Be very careful to make sure you are playing the rhythm correctly: 1 e & a 2 e & a
Now try to play the opposite: long-short-long-short. 1e & a 2 e & a.
Now, shorten the space between the notes: 1 e & a 2 e & a and 1 e & a 2 e & a. Remember to make sure your hands are nice and relaxed. If they are not, you will need to lower the tempo
3. Practice bursts in Groups of three.
Now we will continue extending the length of the bursts. The pattern for this is 3 short, 3 long. 1 e &a 2 e & a 3, and the opposite, 1 e & a 2 e & a 3.
4. Practice bursts in Groups of Four.
Repeat the same process with number three, just with four notes: 1 e & a2 e & a 3 e &, and the opposite: 1 e & a 2 e & a 3 e & a.
5. Extend the length of the bursts until you can play the whole passage at speed.
After doing the groups of four, you should be able to double the length of the groups. If this is not possible, continue to practice the groups of four until you have truly mastered them. If this is still not possible, consider slowing down the tempo. The A minor pentatonic shape is 12 notes in either direction. A modest goal is to be able to play ascending, break, descending at tempo. The ultimate goal is to play the whole scale ascending and descending at full speed.
Increasing Speed
The next step is to start pushing the metronome, which is very much a skill on its own. If 60 BPM is too much of a challenge for you, consider lowering the speed of the metronome. (If your metronome has a 16th note setting, turn that on for tempos below 60 BPM) It is very important to practice playing cleanly with a relaxed left and right hand, so do not set the metronome higher than you can do.
In order to speed up your playing, you need to find your “edge.” Play #2 (bursts in group of 2) and begin to increase the speed on your metronome until you have reached the fastest speed you can play (while staying relaxed). Your first goal at this tempo should be to get up to #4 (groups of four). If you cannot make this happen, lower the tempo until you can play the groups of four well.
Keep Track of your Tempos
Keep these tempos in a notebook, or write them on your sheet music. If you’re trying to get a passage up to the speed of a recording or a metronome marking, this is your “goal tempo.” You should keep this tempo in mind at all times. The tempo you are currently working on is your “current tempo.” In order to be able to play the goal tempo cleanly with a relaxed left and right hands, you have to be realistic about your current tempo. Increase the tempo a few clicks at the end of your practice to see what you can do, just be careful to not get too ambitious too quickly.
If you reach your goal tempo (congratulations!) it wouldn’t hurt to increase the speed of the metronome a little more. This will ensure that you will be very comfortable at your goal tempo, especially if you are bringing this performance to the stage. Just be sure that you know what your goal tempo sounds like so you don’t get into a habit of starting the song too fast.
Stay Consistent
Most of all, the only way to be successful at building up your speed is to keep at it. If you are inconsistent with your practice, it will be difficult to train your fine motor skills. Be consistent with the exercises you practice as well, I cannot emphasize this enough. Starting an exercise and abandoning it the next day is a waste of your time. If you decide to play an exercise, also be sure to practice it well for at least one or two weeks before you move on.
What does it mean to be “stuck in a rut?” I’ll attempt a quick and easy definition: A prolonged period of time where little to no advancement is made. I just got chills writing that out, it hits home pretty hard. All guitarists have this problem at some point, and getting out of this “rut” can be pretty difficult. The key to pulling yourself out of this situation is very clear. A change of mindset is required. Don’t worry, I’m not going to just tell you to “chill out” and chalk that up as my two cents. There are very distinct things we can do to change this mindset and in turn start to see progress on the guitar again.
“Climbing The Mountain” or “Vertical” Learning
In my first post in this series, I went over two different types of learning that I have identified. You can imagine this grid as a line graph. There is “Vertical” learning, or advancing skills, techniques, and overall knowledge of the instrument. Then there is “Horizontal” learning, or the progress you make honing in on each skill. This can be learning new songs, scales, or exercises. To put things in more poetic terms, we can call this “Climbing the Mountain” (horizontal) and “Loving the Plateau” (vertical).
Let’s explore what it means to “climb the mountain” of guitar playing. Real patience is required to scale this musical Matterhorn, as well as strategy and pacing. Trying to advance too quickly can cause some serious self doubt. This can also lead to over-practicing, which can lead to physical (and mental) injury. We all want to advance quickly, but it is much more important to advance correctly. This brings to mind the alternative to the famous phrase: Perfect practice makes perfect. Just practicing doesn’t cut it. You have to practice perfectly. If you just found what I said intimidating, don’t worry. Here are a couple pointers to help you implement this in your practice routine.
Have Very Clear Goals
Try to catch yourself next time you say, “I’m just not getting better at the guitar.” Maybe you’re saying this to yourself, a friend, or your teacher. (If you’re saying this to your teacher, try to think about whether or not you’re doing everything he or she is telling you to do. Many people (including myself) are guilty of receiving excellent lessons, only to go home and do something completely different during practice.) When you ask this question, be sure to follow it up with “Well, what are you trying to get better at?” If you’re response to that is “guitar, duhhh,” then you are setting yourself up for a vicious cycle of broadness. It’s time to seriously narrow down what your goals are.
If you’re lucky, you will be able to immediately identify what these goals are. Perhaps you’ve earned yourself the opportunity to skip this paragraph. If you’re not quite sure, start by thinking about what genre you’re playing. It’s also good to think about who your main inspirations are. What do those guitarists do that you’d like to do? Is there something all of these artists have in common? Perhaps you are trying to make an audition or get into a band that plays a specific genre. What are the requirements? Maybe there is just a song or group of songs that you’ve been trying to learn for a really long time without any sign of progress. Spend some time trying to figure out what techniques this song requires that you are falling short on.
Learn Guitar Exercises
If you’re anything like I was as a teenager, you would have seen the heading “Learn Exercises,” said “cool!” and left this page looking for new exercises to learn. Hold on! It’s not like that. I used to be like a sponge for exercises. Every website, every article in every Guitar World magazine I owned, every VHS tape I owned (OK, now I’m dating myself) had some fancy new exercise. “Increase your speed with this arpeggio sequence!” “Gain sick chops with this fancy chromatic trick!” It can be an information overload which can lead to very disorganized, distracted practice habits.
It’s important to take a step back to think “what do I need to get better at?” If you’re looking to get better at chord transitions, you want chordal exercises. If you want to improve your speed, you need to do some training with a metronome. Every skill has an endless amount of exercises that goes along with it, you can even make up exercises yourself based on the specific things that are hanging you up. Once as you have done your research, choose some favorites.
Routine, Routine, Routine
Continue for at least two weeks doing only two or three of these exercises every day. That’s right, that sentence is bold, italicized, AND underlined. If you want to get the full effect of the exercise, playing it once for five minutes is going to do nothing for you. If you are really looking to advance your skills, consistency is your best friend. Start every practice with the same exercises. This way you will advance your ability to control your fingers. If you have chosen your exercises well, you will find that you are subconsciously putting these new skills to work on every song you play. Sometimes, you may even find yourself reminding yourself of an exercise when you are getting hung up on a passage of a song.
If you are trying to advance your speed, don’t get ahead of yourself. (I’m not just talking to shredders when I say speed, this also refers to chord changes, arrangements, anything that you are incapable of playing at performance tempo.) Choose the metronome setting that is just enough of a challenge for you and stick with it for those two-three weeks. This may be painful for some readers, but your brain needs to really sink in to the challenge tempo.
Take Songs you want to Learn and Stick with them
Now that you have an exercise routine, spend some time figuring out what songs you want to learn that have been a challenge for you. Perhaps you may need to spend some time finding new songs to play. Only choose one or two depending on how much of a challenge they are. Make sure your song selection is something you are interested in learning, because you want to practice it every day for at least a month. If you find you need longer at the end of the month, don’t worry, just keep going.
In an age of immediate gratification, it is easy for us to get frustrated over lack of progress very quickly. Setting a goal with a time period of a month or longer allows us to relax and sink into a routine. Instead of saying to yourself “I’ve been playing this song for three days and I still can’t get it!” you will find you are simply saying “Day 3/30.”
If you find you haven’t mastered the song(s) after the month, don’t immediately start to get frustrated. Take a step back and consider what this month has done for your playing. You will find that you have absorbed a lot and that you are a better player for it. If you are sick of the song at the end of the month, put it down and start something new. You’ve earned it. If you still feel determined to master the song, by all means, go another month.
Consider Your Deadlines
If you are preparing for an audition or a performance, there can be a much larger element of stress to the feeling of lack of progress. You have no choice but to get better. In the end, that’s a great thing, but the process is stressful. For the sake of relevance, let’s say your audition/performance is one month away. Take some time to consider what you have to accomplish in this time and how many hours you have each day to do so. Then make a commitment to practice exactly what you need to every day for that thirty days. When you set a goal like this, you are less likely to slack on it. I don’t want to cheat my future self with an imperfect 29/30 days of practice.
Without doing this extra element of scheduling, it can be very easy to procrastinate (if you’re even the slightest bit like me, that is). You will find that the deadline is getting close and you haven’t been practicing. This causes an extra element of stress, which makes practicing even harder. “Cramming doesn’t work,” remember? If you stick with your pre-determined routine for the time period you have available, you will find that the performance you give is as close to the best you could do as possible. Feel like you could have done much better? Learn from your mistakes. Perhaps you needed much longer than a month to prepare, or the routine you had chosen wasn’t appropriate enough.
I have an a series about auditioning for college coming up soon!
Have Faith!
I have a lot of students who say to me “I’m practicing a lot every day, and I’m just not seeing results yet.” A lot of times they make this statement after demonstrating to me that they have come a long way in the past 7 days. I always say to them, “If you are putting the time in and having good, focused practice sessions, you will see results, you just have to keep at it.
The difference between their perception of improvement and my perception of their improvement is that they seeing their progress on a day-to-day basis. It’s hard to perceive change that way. If you plant a seed, put a chair in front of the pot, and watch the plant grow, you will find the process to not be rewarding because plants grow too slowly for spectators (with a natural amount of patience). If someone watches you plant the seed, goes away for a month, and comes back, they will return to see a fully grown plant.
A great way to help yourself realize your progress is to record yourself at the beginning of every week (or every day if you’d like). Each recording is like a snapshot of your progress. After a month, you will be shocked at how much better your recordings sound.
Learning an instrument really can be a leap of faith. There is so much time and money invested, and most of the time you never know when you will get where you want to be. By sticking to a routine, your practice really becomes “a practice,” and you will learn to see, hear, and feel tiny improvements in your skills from day to day.
We all have felt the dreaded feeling of being “stuck in a rut” when trying to learn guitar. It can feel like weeks, months, or even years since there has been any noticeable progress, and it’s horribly frustrating. If you’re a beginner you may think, “I have been stuck in a rut since day one!” Being constantly concerned about making leaps and bounds on the instrument can make learning the guitar very difficult. We can become unhealthily attached to seeing our skills skyrocket. It takes a bit of relaxing, and a bit of faith, to let go of this attachment. The common saying for this is “loving the plateau,” and it takes a true Zen guitarist to master it.
“Climbing the Mountain” and “Loving the Plateau” or, “Vertical” and “Horizontal” learning.
As a classical guitar student in college, I had a very erratic practice schedule. This schedule had a very distinct pattern: practice, over-practice, injury, no practice. I wasn’t the only one, this seemed to be a very common habit among students. The obsession with learning the most challenging music and pushing my physical abilities was much stronger than my actual abilities. It led to very inconvenient periods where I had no choice but to step back from the instrument. My teacher, while helping me with these practice habits, taught me to “love the plateau.” It was the first time I heard the phrase. This led to a change of mindset focused around routine and mindful practicing. To this day I am still trying to perfect this.
While my classical guitar cautionary tale may be interesting, you may be thinking “How does this apply to me? I play blues guitar and my hands feel fine.” Regardless of what genre of music we play, and to what extent we play it, there is a natural ebb and flow that comes along with progress. The brain needs to absorb the enormous amounts of knowledge it takes in about the instrument. Sometimes this takes more time than we would like.
I talk to all of my students about how I perceive the two stages of learning. There is “Vertical” learning, or “climbing the mountain.” These are the new skills you learn, which over time make you the best guitarist you can be. Then there is “Horizontal” learning, also known as “Loving the Plateau.” The guitarist who learns to balance both vertical and horizontal progress will become more prolific, more musical, and most importantly, more sane.
The first time I learned to “Love the Plateau,” and how it came to a sudden halt.
As a young teenager, I really struggled when it came to teaching myself how to strum chords. There were kids all around me who were playing songs for their friends. I wanted to be just like them. It took me a while, but once as I got the hang of it I was strumming constantly. As long as it had chords, it was worth me strumming it. I was a musical sponge, and my song list was growing rapidly. My skill level had increased in the “vertical” sense, I had climbed higher on the mountain. I stopped trying to learn new techniques and started learning as many songs as I could using these techniques. This was one of the best examples of “horizontal” learning I ever experienced. I was on that plateau and I had no concerns about climbing any higher. I was loving it.
After a couple of months, I decided there was one particular song I wanted to learn. Sounded easy enough, but it ended up putting a huge halt on my horizontal progress. The song was all barre chords, which I had never attempted before. I had seen my friends playing them, but it was simply impossible. In hind sight, I needed to build strength and the action on that guitar was way too high. At the time however, it seemed like there was no looking back. There was no way to get any better at the guitar. I had hit a vertical rock face on the otherwise easy trail of my guitar playing.
Learn guitar skills both “Vertically” and “Horizontally.”
It’s in times like this that we go from taking a beautiful carefree stroll through the woods to shuddering while looking at the shadow the gigantic mountain is casting of us. Be it new techniques, improvisational creativity, or overcoming physical challenges, the psychological effect of realizing how much further you have to go can be paralyzing. In the case of my younger self facing barre chords for the first time, I had no choice but to go back to playing the songs I had considered “easy” at that point. Every couple days, when I was feeling courageous, I would have another go at the song with the barre chords. Before I knew it, barre chords were a new skill. I had reached a new plateau and I loved it just as much as the last one.
This “horizontal” learning is the key to progressing as a guitar player. If you’ve learned a couple new techniques, really spend some time with them. Find as many songs as you can that you can learn with your newfound techniques. You will find that you needed much more practice with them than you realized. In order to progress “vertically” spend a little bit of time each practice session trying to touch upon the new challenge that is giving you problems. Learn to love the challenge just as much as you love the plateau. After all, when you are not thinking about how hard it will be to climb the mountain, it sure is a pretty sight from below.
How to adapt a “Horizontal” learning routine.
The key to becoming successful at “loving the plateau” is having a plateau to love. It is very easy to get into the bad habit of practicing something completely different every day. For example: On day 1, you learn the harmonic minor scale and a couple phrases from your favorite Van Halen solo. On day 2, you practice fingerstyle technique and a couple phrases of a Bach piece. While it’s fun to be curious, having one or two things you routinely do every day is very helpful. If you want to learn the harmonic minor scale, spend every day for at least a month practicing it. Don’t learn it one day and assume you will actually remember it in a couple weeks.
As far as learning new songs using your current skill set goes, actually spend some time writing down your skills on the guitar. Set a timer for 20-30 minutes (or longer). Force yourself to come up with as many skills as possible and you will be surprised with how many you get down. While you are writing this, you may already start thinking of songs or exercises you can be learning to help reinforce these skills. There may be many fundamental things you don’t practice because you feel like you surpassed them years ago. All of these things need reinforcement, and it’s very easy to keep trying to learn bigger and better things instead.
Teaching guitar lessons, my way of practicing fundamentals.
Most days of the week, I spend hours teaching people how to learn guitar. Although many of my students are Intermediate-Advanced, I have lots of beginner students. These students are an incredible resource for my own “horizontal” learning because I spend most of the lesson counting basic rhythms with them. After many years, I realized my sense of rhythm has grown incredibly solid! There are many reasons for this, but I feel teaching beginners certainly has helped. As an aspiring professional musician, I had no idea I would be spending that much time playing songs in beginner method books.
Teaching lessons is my outlet for “horizontal” learning. It may take a little searching, but you too can find your outlet for practicing easier material. It is easy to get bored with easier material because it is not challenging enough. If you strive for absolute perfection with easier material, it becomes just as much of a challenge. Let’s say you learned how to strum “Brown Eyed Girl” when you were 12 and haven’t touched it since. Sit down and try to strum that chord progression while counting out loud with perfect rhythm, perfect form, the perfect dynamic. Can you keep this sense of perfection while singing and playing? Suddenly the challenge has increased, and with it your feeling of satisfaction. When you go back to playing the music that caused you to get stuck in the first place, you will have a new perspective on how to approach it.
