How To Quickly Become A Better Guitarist
It feels great when you are making fast progress in your guitar playing and seeing yourself become the player you always wanted to be. In contrast, making slow progress can be very frustrating. Many guitar players are not fulfilling their potential due to using poor practicing habits or following false conventional wisdom about how to get better.
The following points help you understand how to make faster progress on guitar while avoiding some of the common mistakes that cause frustration for others:
Practice using an effective schedule to reach your musical goals
You hold yourself back from becoming a better guitarist when you don’t use an effective guitar practice routine. One of the worst things you can do for making progress (that so many guitarists do) is practice by simply playing things at random or noodling around. Although this may be fun to do, this is not something you should be doing with practice time if you want to get better fast.
Instead, develop an effective practice schedule based on your musical goals. Anytime you practice, you should be making at least a little progress to reach your goals. If you aren’t doing this, you are just wasting your time. To ensure that you are practicing as effectively and efficiently as possible, find a great guitar teacher to work with.
Before working with a new guitar teacher, make sure he has already helped many others achieve their musical goals. Then, tell them about your goals. They will create a specific strategy to help you get the most out of your practice time so you reach your musical goals as fast as possible.
Don’t neglect some areas of your guitar playing when practicing others
This is a very common mistake. Many guitarists only practice new skills in total isolation from everything else they know. Although this may help them improve their muscle memory for these techniques/skills, they do not learn how to actually use what they learn in musical situations (which almost always use multiple skills at once). As a result, they are held back by their inability to combine different areas of their playing together. So they feel like a total beginner when trying to do things like solo or improvise… despite the fact that they actually have good technical skills.
Remember, playing guitar is about playing music, not just learning techniques, memorizing fingering positions for scales, etc. When you practice, focus on combining different skills together such as scales and phrasing, vibrato and bends and countless other combinations. This helps you become a better overall guitarists and musician much faster.
Focus on improving your musical creativity
A lot of guitar players falsely think that creativity is something you have to be born with. Wrong! Like any other guitar/musical skill, creativity can be learned, developed, practiced and mastered. Constantly look for creative ways to practice and use different ideas together. This makes playing guitar more challenging and fun. To get the best results, work together with a guitar teacher who has already helped many others become creative players. A teacher like this understands how to help you develop creativity through effective practice strategies.
When you apply all the points of this article into your guitar playing, you become a better player much faster. So, don’t hesitate! Begin applying what you’ve learned here and enjoy the results.