Do you ever feel like you could make better use of your practice time? Many guitarists make some key mistakes while practicing that stop them from seeing real progress. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at the top five guitar practice mistakes you might be making.
1. Practicing your mistakes
The first of these is practicing through mistakes in your playing. When you do this, you’re essentially programming the mistakes into your muscle memory. That often means slowing things right down and focusing on accuracy over speed.
2. Practicing too fast
Like mistake number one, practicing something too fast is a surefire way to get yourself into trouble. Thinking that kinks will “work themselves out” is another way to program mistakes into your playing. If someone can recognize what you’re practicing, then you’re likely playing it too fast.
3. Practicing inconsistently
The third way to sabotage your progress is practicing inconsistently. It’s important to practice every day (or as close to it as possible). Even if it means cutting your session to 20 minutes per day, consistent practice delivers huge results.
4. Practicing without a plan
The next mistake guitar players make is practicing without any sort of plan in place. Take some time to write down your guitar goals, and make sure they meet the S.M.A.R.T. criteria: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, & Time-Bound. If your goals meet these requirements, you’ll be setting yourself up for maximum success.
5. Practicing without a goal
The fifth and final practice mistake is not practicing with a musical goal in mind. Learning a bunch of chords, strumming patterns, and scales is great, but if you can’t put them together to play music you’re going to lose motivation and momentum. Choose a simple song that you can learn alongside everything else to make sure things stay musical.
Reflect on your own guitar practice and try implementing a few of these strategies to improve the time you spend on the guitar. We all have busy schedules, and getting the most out of your practice time is a great way to get even more joy out of playing the guitar.
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