How to Measure 1% Improvements in Your Practice
A concept that we explored in How to Practice Guitar was making small improvements each week. By making a 1% improvement each week, we know for a mathetmical fact that as long as we’re consistent with our guitar practice, eventually we will reach our goals, whatever they may be.
It’s an important, and I think, very motivating concept.
It’s something that we’ve discussed several times in various posts on this blog. And recently a reader emailed in with an important question: The concept makes sense, but how can we measure that improvement?
Ways to Measure Your Guitar Playing
The most obvious is with tempo. We can take an exercise that we’re practising with a metronome and try to get it 1% faster. With daily practice, improving metronome speeds by 1% a week should be achievable for most people. If you’re putting in daily practice time and struggling to improve your metronome tempo by 1% then you need to look at how you are approaching your practice.
You could also look at this from the perspective of learning songs - can you play 1% further through the song you’re learning than you could last week? If you are playing something that’s vaguely within your ability, or even pushing it, with consistent practice this should be achievable.
There are other less ‘mathematical’ approaches we can take, for example, can you play an exercise with 1% less mistakes than you did last week? Maybe that means the chord changes are a bit cleaner, or the chords ring out a bit more clearly. Can you get through a two or three more pages in the theory book that you’re working on?
If you’re working on a song, can you write a few more bars of the drums? Or write a couple of new riffs that could be used for the verse?
If you’re working on your improvisation, can you work on using a few different keys this week? Or work on the next scale pattern? Or integrating two patterns you already know together so that you can transition between them more smoothly?
Can you take some licks you’ve been working on and make them 1% better by creating some variations with the rhythm, or variations in how you are using ornamentation techniques to play them?
You could record yourself playing through a song and try and make 1% less mistakes.
You could record yourself playing a riff to a metronome and try and get 1% more of the notes in time with the click.
Improvement Isn’t Just About Speed
When thinking about improving at guitar it’s easy to just think about speed, as that’s the easiest metric to measure, but there is a lot more to playing guitar than ripping as fast as possible (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).
Don’t get hung up on trrying to exactly measure 1%, instead think of it as “just a little bit better than last time”, work at it, and you’ll find you keep making consistent progress.
Applying This to Teaching Students
If you are teaching guitar, then this is a mindset that you want to pass on to your students, as it will help them make consistent progress in their playing.
As outlined in How to Teach Guitar, you achieve this not by giving the student lots and lots of new infomation (the classic guitar teacher mistake), but by training them on material.
Your lessons with your students should be mostly training, and when they go home they should be replicating that lesson everyday, training on the material.
During the lesson you will hand out small pointers to them and asking them to focus on very specific areas of their playing for a few minutes at a time, which helps them make several 1% improvements, and also implicitly demonstrates to them how to effectively practice by themselves at home.
The purpose of teaching guitar is…. drum roll please… to help your students improve at guitar. They improve fastest by practising and focusing on small problems one at at time.
Conclusion
Hopefully this has given you some ideas for ways you can focus on improving your guitar playing. When you’re practising this week, ask yourself, “How can I be 1% better than last week?”, and then set about achieving it.