Sometimes after you’ve practiced, you feel like your fingers are sore but your guitar playing hasn’t changed a bit. You might practice some riffs, play a chord you almost remember playing, play a bit of a song, maybe try out some idea you’ve never attempted and feel like everything got jumbled in one jumbling session. This is one of the most common problems you will encounter on your guitar journey as a beginner. It isn’t a lack of time or interest, but a lack of having a job for every single one of your hands. Without structure, the hands repeat what they know. They practice what they’ve done before. Without the structure of knowing what you should work on, you’ll just repeat everything you’ve done before to practice what you know.
To practice properly, focus on one skill. Instead of telling yourself, “I’m going to practice guitar today”, try to identify the job for each hand. Maybe you want to focus on cleaner chord changes, more steady down-up strums, consistent fingerpicking, more accurate timing of a melody, or better finger strength. Regardless of what the job may be, try to tie every part of your practice to that one skill. If you wanted to play cleaner chord changes, then do a warmup that focuses on chord changes, then do a drill for a couple minutes that repeats that motion, and finally play a snippet of a song that uses those changes. The idea is that the job of every single exercise ties together for a clear result. The brain likes to know exactly what it should improve.
A way to use this is to break your fifteen-minute practice by the skill it is designed to improve. Play your chord change in a familiar song, maybe check how comfortable you are by doing some comfortable warmup. Play through each chord slowly and check which ones are ringing, which ones you don’t know, or which ones you don’t remember. Practice the movement you need to improve, for example, switching between chord D and A. You might not put the D and A transition inside of a whole song yet, but just repeat it by playing D then A several times. You’re allowed to stop for a moment. You might not put a new chord into a new section of a song until later. You might need to play that two-bar section a few times at slow tempo first until your finger strength or accuracy improves. Then replay that two-bar section without stopping to see what you could play. This isn’t going to seem long, and you might have only worked on the D and A transition a little, but you’re doing something useful for every single minute in each of those fifteen.
One mistake is to switch tasks too soon or to stop working on a drill because you made a mistake and you don’t feel bored. It is very easy to get bored very soon. But the truth is that once you start learning to do a movement, it’s going to be more boring to the fingers. The hands don’t really enjoy learning. They don’t enjoy learning or trying to understand the movement. The first few tries are more exciting because the movement will look more and more difficult. When you do try to play through some of the movement more, the fingers might not seem to improve and it will feel more and more dull. But that is actually useful. You’re not really improving because your movements are too much, the hands are not used to the movement. You need to play through the movement a few more times. The second thing you should watch out for is playing too fast. If you keep playing through that chord change in tempo until you get it wrong, try slowing the tempo until you get it right more than a few times. It’s not like taking time to slow down the tempo is a bad thing. Slowing the tempo lets you actually play through it. It is more useful if you actually play it correctly a few times and stop it. Then move on and try again.
The next time you find yourself feeling stuck in your guitar practice, you have to start asking better questions. For example, instead of saying, “This is wrong”, you should ask yourself, “Why is it wrong?” Maybe it’s the timing. Maybe there’s another mistake you’re not seeing. Maybe the D and A transition takes some time to improve because you’re pressing a ring finger that’s not comfortable. If the D and A transition doesn’t work out, maybe it’s because the A transition comes out wrong sometimes. That is because the ring finger is coming up too high, so now that you know your mistake you could start by fixing the transition of the finger. That is one way you can improve your guitar practice and it can lead to you improving as quickly and efficiently as possible. The more you ask questions, the better the result. Instead of just guessing at what you could do, let your practice sessions help you answer those questions. Each day can build into your hands.
