When teaching students, there were five things I wanted to make sure every student could do. Sometimes I would be teaching a student from scratch and we would go through these, and sometimes students would start who had been playing for years and knew some of these things and not others, so we would go over their weak spots before moving onto more advanced material.
So without further ado…
1) A Few Riffs 99% of guitarists will start with this, but I’ll mention it for completeness.
After the last article on how to measure improvements in your guitar practice a reader emailed with the following question on improving their practice:
Hi Sam ,I’m learning a fingerstyle piece called struttin rag by stefan grossman. I’m struggling to even slightly increase the tempo a few beats to get a tiny section at the same speed as the rest of the piece which i can play no bother.It needs this tempo to bring about a lively performance.
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.
We all want to make progress, but often we go about it the wrong way, trying a lesson here, wathcing a YouTube video there, and trying bits and pieces of this and that… and as a result, not making any real progress.
Making real progress requires working at something for several days, weeks or even months; depending on the scope of what you are trying to learn.
Let’s look at three different examples of this, for beginners, more advanced players and guitar teachers: