Five Week Practice Plan for Beginners
I recently had a couple of emails from a beginner guitarist looking to make a bit more progress with their playing.
His email brought out a few key points and also hi-lights a problem with how guitar is often taught to beginners, so I wanted to (anonymously) share some sections of his email and the best way to go about solving his problems.
We’ll break the email down to identify some key-points, then put together a simple practice plan that should give some satisfying results.
Quick disclaimer: This article might read a bit negatively, but in no way am I trying to disparage the reader, or take a negative take on what he’s done so far. It’s awesome that someone is learning guitar and putting in the effort. However I am going to communicate my ideas as clearly as possible - which may sound a bit negative at times.
The Email
What do I hope to achieve in the time I have left? I’m 78. Honest answer! To play a selection of chords, in tune well enough to enjoy playing my music which is mostly English and Irish folk. I’m learning the chords but I’m having problems with fretting at the right place on the fretboard and in time with the song without hitting dead strings
Let’s break this down:
To play a selection of chords
This is definitely achievable. Most guitar players are more than capable of learning a few chords a week, even beginners.
in tune well enough
I’m not entirely sure what this means. If you want your chords to be in tune, then as-long as the guitar is in tune and you are holding down the right chord, the chord is in tune.
One thing I would always try to hammer home to my students was the importance of using the correct words - guitarists are awful at describing some aspects of music and guitar players using words that don’t make sense.
Accurate use of language is key to clear thinking. If you can’t use words accurately, you are not thinking clearly.
To get back to the readers’ question, he is probably talking about “sounding good”, which means:
- Chord is fretted correctly
- Chord is strummed in time
- All the right parts of the chord ring out nicely
to enjoy playing my music which is mostly English and Irish folk.
He has clear goals - this is great. This could be taken one step further with a list of five songs he’d like to learn.
Once he has those five songs he can look into the techniques being used to play them (something we’ll come to a bit later).
Once he knows the techniques and the chords he needs to learn, creating a practice plan over the course of a few weeks which breaks things down into manageable pieces is reasonably easy (although it might be worth asking a good guitar teacher to help with this).
I’m learning the chords but I’m having problems with fretting at the right place on the fretboard
If you’ve read How to Practice Guitar, then you’ll know that there are five techniques you can use to train any chord, which will speed up how your fingers can find the chord.
There’s also a video on YouTube here which gives an example of one of these techniques:
It’s important to have the right expectations of yourself. If you have just started learning the chords, then even if you are practising perfectly they are going to sound roped for a bit. If you’ve been playing these chords for a few weeks and they still sound terrible, then we need to start thinking about what is going on and how we can fix them.
in time with the song
Always be using a metronome! more on this later.
without hitting dead strings
This is important to get right, but if we were to put the challenges he’s mentioned into a hierarchy, it would come below correctly fretting the chord and playing it in time. Once you can fret it correctly and play it in time, ‘fine tuning’ what your fingers are doing is much easier.
It’s also important to note that ‘dead strings’ could refer to two things:
- The strumming hand hitting the wrong strings
- The fretting hand not hold down the strings correctly
In order to fix this, we would need to know which hand is causing the problem
There are a few things here that are important to realise:
- He has clear goals, but they could be clearer
- He has a clear idea of the challenges he has to overcome
Summarising Those Challenges
We can summarise the email into the following points:
- Learning enough chords to play the songs he wants to play
- Change chords effectively
- Play chord changes in time
Current Approach
Now we know what the problems are, how can we go about solving them?
The guitarist in question sent me some sheets he’s been working from and… well I’ve got to say, it was a bit of an instant face-palm moment for me.
He’s been going to a local guitar group (which is great!) and I think someone there was trying to be helpful and gave him some sheets on things to work on, but in doing so they made the classic guitar teacher mistake - they gave the student too much information.
He has a sheet of chords with 12 chords on it - this is way too many chords to be focussing on.
There was another sheet of finger-picking guidelines which I thought was not terribly clear on what he should be doing. The author was using prose to describe the finger picking pattern, and when doing that you at least need a clearly labelled tablature example.
However the main point is: Trying to learn a ton of new chords and learn to finger-pick them all at the same time is a nightmare.
A Five Week Plan
Like anything else in life, we have to break this down into the components of what we are trying to do, then integrate those components into what we want to be able to do.
We want to take our time and make sure that we are at least giving ourselves a chance of being able to learn.
Side story: When I was at university, I took a module on the physics behind how satellites scan the Earth. It was a fascinating topic - there’s all sorts of odd effects and technicalities that you have to allow for. Anyway, the professor teaching the topic was incredibly knowledgeable and was one of the top researchers in his field in the world. His method of teaching was to basically recite a textbook to your for an hour drawing up equations on the board as he went. His lectures felt like a fire-hose of algebra… and everyone hated them and struggled to learn anything.
This situation is very similar - our reader has been given far too much to work on at once and needs to break things down into some bite-size and more manageable pieces.
Which is what we’re about to do.
It’s a good idea to learn simple strumming patterns before finger-picking. This is because when finger-picking, your chord changes have to be incredibly fast and precise - if the finger-picking pattern ends at the end of the bar, you have a fraction of a second to get the next chord down before the next part of the finger-picking pattern.
If you are strumming, for example whole notes, after strumming the chord you are on, you have a couple of seconds to get to the next chord before the metronome comes round. I know this is technically ‘cheating’, but we have to start somewhere and when teaching students, I’ve found this to be an incredibly effective way to start.
Learn simple strumming first, get the hang of that then work on applying finger picking.
The following plan would probably work well for this guitarist (each item is a new week, so item 1 in the list is Week 1, item 2 is Week 2, etc), assuming 30-60 minutes a day of practice:
Week 1 - memorisation
Work on memorising three chords, for example, Am, D and E. Use the five chords change techniques.
Goal: Right fingers in the right place. Don’t worry about how they sound. They’ll sound crap, that’s ok. Strum them once or twice and then do the next one.
Week 2 - Strumming whole notes
Metronome time. You know I love the metronome. Set the metronome to something slow, for example 45bpm. We are going to play Am - D - E in time to the metronome, playing one strum for each chord on the ‘one’.
Once you strum the chord, start moving to the next chord so you’re ready for when the metronome comes round again. Goal: Develop a sense of timing with the chord changes. Chords won’t sound perfect or ring for the full bar, but that’s ok.
Week 3 - Half note strumming
Slightly more complex strumming pattern, using half notes on Beats 1 and 3. Maybe add in some quarter note and half notes rhythms. Again, simple rhythms.
Write out some different orders for the chords Am, D and E and try them with the rhythms. Keep the tempo nice and slow. Again, the goal here is not to create the perfect sound, but to get the right fingers in the right places at the right time.
Week 4 - Quarter note strumming
Same chord progression, but we are using quarter notes. The increased rhythmic density gives less time to change chord, making the progression more challenging.
You can also put the chords in different orders. If you do this, write them out and practice that particular progression. Do not randomly choose chords on the fly.
Week 5 - finger picking
A series of finger picking exercises, starting with half notes, then quarter notes, then quarter notes with eighth notes. This might take two weeks to work through.
After this, repeat the practice plan with two or three new chords and slightly increasing the tempos you are working at.
You can see this plan takes a lot longer to work through, taking five weeks to work through just part of the two sheets the reader was originally given.
However, with this plan the reader will be able to actually play something, rather than get stuck trying to learn a whole page of chords and complex finger-picking patterns.
Additional Resources
There are three great resources that guitarists in a similar position can use:
- Two Minute Guitar. This book comes with a free 30 day beginner course and is a great resource for anyone wanting to learn guitar to get started and down something.
- Lauren Bateman’s six level system. This is a comprehensive beginner program suitable for guitarists wanting to learn acoustic and folk.
- Rock Guitar Mastery. This is a great program for beginner guitarists who want to learn rock music, focussing on learning songs from start to finish. This is probably one of the most fun and effective ways to learn guitar.