8 Ways You Can Improve Your Guitar Playing

Making progress on guitar can be challenging, so here’s a quick list of 8 ways you can improve your guitar playing:

1) Plan Your Practice Time

The biggest mistake that a lot of people have with their guitar playing… is that they are not playing their guitar.

I get it - you work all day, come home, then there’s the kids, dinner, fixing that shelf; all sorts of things that need to be dealt with…

Or you just want to put in a pizza and watch sone Netflix.

But if that practice doesn’t happen, you won’t improve.

So plan it. Sit down and write down when you are going to practice during the week. Or even better, have a set time that is always practice time.

If you have a busy work life, one approach that can be highly effective is to get up earlier and goto bed earlier, and practice before work rather than after. This way your mind is fresh rather than exhausted.

2) Identify Specific Problems

Quite often guitarists approach practice by playing, for example, a song they are learning over and over, effectively hoping that the mistakes will fix themselves with enough repetitions. And to an extent, that does work.

But it is much, much faster to identify specific problems that occur.

For example, let’s say you’re learning a song and there is a chord change that sounds bad every time you get to it. What’s the problem?

• Can your hand not form the chord fast enough?
• Are you strumming in the wrong direction?
• Do your fingers “wiggle” between chord changes?
• Is one of your fingers going to the wrong fret or string?

Figure out exactly what the problem is.

3) Focus on Fixing Those Problems

Once you have identified specific problems, you can fix them. This is simple a case of slowing down and performing the movement correctly.

This is where using a metronome comes in useful, because it will allow you to keep the rhythm accurate while you practice slowly.

Rather than just playing through the song another 100 times, focus on the tiny section where the mistake is occurring and repeat that section at a tempo where you can play it correctly.

Focus on playing it correctly 10 times, then increasing the tempo a tiny amount, and playing it 10 times correctly again. Slowly increase the tempo this way.

You will find that with a bit of practice, the things that were difficult and didn’t work get easier and easier.

4) Know What You Want to Work Towards

A lot of guitar players have zero direction when it comes to what they are practising.

Having direction comes from having something to work towards. When you know what you are working towards, you can prioritise what it is you are working on.

• Want to be a shredder? Then you need to work on your technique.
• Want to be a songwriter? Then you need to work on rhythm, harmony, lyrics and arrangement.
• Want to be a rhythm player in a pub band? You need to work on repertoire and rhythm.

Sit down and take five minutes to think about what it is you want to be able to do with the guitar, figure out the things you need to be able to know and do to get there, then you can start working towards those goals.

5) Challenge How You Approach Different Skills and Ideas

A lot of guitar players take an almost child-like approach to learning new skills and techniques on the guitar.

For example, they’ll learn a three note per string C major scale in first position, and say to themselves, “I can play the major scale”.

But can they:

• Play it in different keys?
• Play it starting from different notes in the scale, not just the 6th string every time?
• Improvise with it?
• Play the scale through multiple positions?
• Transition from rhythm playing, into the scale, and back into rhythm playing?
• Play the scale with a different rhythm?
• Play the scale in intervals?
• Play the scale sequencing a melodic pattern?
• Transition from playing the scale into tapping or sweep picking?

As you can see, there is a lot that can be done with a simple scale position. Once you have the hang of playing something like a new scale or arpeggio, immediately start thinking about what you can do with it, what you can transition to and from with it and how you can integrate it with other areas of your guitar playing.

6) Use a Metronome

A lot of students don’t like working with a metronome… and a lot of students struggle to make progress.

You don’t have to like it, but you do have to use it. It’s a simple fact of reality that if you want to be serious about your playing, you have to use a metronome. You can accept that fact and improve… or don’t accept it and don’t improve.

Set your metronome to play one click per sub-division that you are working on.

If you haven’t used one before, start slow and gradually introduce it into your practice.

In general, the more you can use one the better. You’re playing will thank you for it, and if you stick with it you will be pleased at the progress you start making!

7) Work Through a Structured Curriculum

One of the most challenging things with working by yourself on your playing is having to choose what to work on next:

• Your practice involves looking at random YouTube lessons
• You’re never sure what to practice next
• Or when to move on from one exercise to another
• It’s easy to get distracted with things that look fun
• More often than not you are working through topics in a random order
• You end up with blind spots that you are not aware of

Having a structured program to guide your progress make an incredible difference. With a structured program and someone to guide you through it, usually it’s impossible not to make progress.

• If you want personal help with your guitar playing, check out the online guitar coaching program. I personally set you lessons that help you, creating a structured plan to get you from where you are to where you want to be, and helping you through it with feedback and advice as we go.

8) Regularly Evaluate Your Playing

Often when playing it is difficult to objectively look and listen to what we are doing. After all, we’re thinking about getting the chord change right and what the next chord change is, listening to the song to try and keep in time and thinking about the next section that’s coming up… it is a lot for our brain to process.

Regularly recording and videoing yourself is a great way to get instant feedback on your playing. This is something that you should be doing at least once a week, if not for a few minutes everyday.

You can record your audio and listen back and then work on improving your playing. You can make a video and evaluate what your hands are doing and work on improving your technique.

Using your phone is good enough for this, but you can also use programs such as Logic Pro or GarageBand, or any other DAW to help you.