If you are managing to practice guitar every day and you’re not seeing results then possibly you’re not practicing in the right way. It’s not just a matter of picking up your guitar and strumming chords or endlessly playing scales until the clock tells you it’s time to stop. Learning how to practice guitar demands a certain attitude. Your attention should always be focused on how you are holding and playing the guitar.
Our bodies are capable of remembering our movements. It’s called muscle memory, and we need to learn how to work with it. Muscle memory helps us drive a car, catch a ball, chew gum and walk at the same time, and practice guitar. But we must be sure in our heads of what we are doing or what we’re about to do. That’s the only way we can teach our bodies. The more we are able to direct our attention on what our bodies are doing, the quicker we can set in motion our muscular memory.
When we practice the guitar we are using many muscles and some of those muscles don’t want to practice guitar. We enlist the cooperation of these muscles by practicing slowly. We can try and relax muscles that we don’t need to play the scales or change the chords, or whatever we are working on at the moment, and use only the amount of muscular tension that we need.
The most helpful reminders to focus our attention are the mistakes that we make during our practice. Our mistakes are the body’s way of telling us to slow down. So, if you find yourself fluffing notes, don’t get all tense and frustrated, just repeat what you have been practicing, only more carefully. If you practice mistakes your body will learn mistakes and it will be hard to unlearn them.
When you practice your guitar you need rest just as much as if you are engaging in some strenuous physical exercise. The longer you practice the more you drain your mind and body of the capacity to learn. If you are able to practice for hours at a time be sure to take five or ten minutes break about every thirty minutes. If you have decided to practice a chord change or scale, don’t just repeat it over and over again. Take breaks of ten or 20 seconds between each repetition. That way you won’t tire yourself so much.
Every scale, chord shape or chord change means corresponding muscular tension. Try and divideyour practice up into small muscular movements. You can do this with any kind of practice, but it’s easier to explain in terms of practicing scales. Instead of playing a scale all the way up or down, try breaking it up into just two or three notes at a time with a small break in between. Try this for a couple of days every time you practice and see if you start to get some benefit from it.
Do you want to learn to play the guitar? Learn How To Play A Guitar For Free is a constantly updated blog which contains all the resources you need for: learning to play solo guitar, how to learn guitar chords, how to learn to read and play easy acoustic guitar tabs, finding a free online guitar tuner, looking for free guitar lessons online, and how to learn guitar scales.
