5
Jun
2009
5 Tips For An Effective Guitar Practice Session
We all know that practice makes perfect, right? Especially so when it comes to learning to play the guitar, or any instrument for that matter. However, you need to make sure that your guitar practice time is spent effectively, to make the best progress. Here are 5 tips for your guitar practice sessions.
- Daily Practice:
This is a basic one, but quite fundamental for anyone who wants to make the most progress. Try to practice for a certain minimum amount of time every day, say at least half an hour. Practicing every day like this is far more effective than practicing for an equivalent amount of time a couple of times per week.
I read once that Jimi Hendrix used to play his guitar everywhere, even when he went to the bathroom! While you don’t have to quite follow suit, try and practice as much as you can, at least every day, and you will soon see the results.
- Use a Metronome:
A very important guitar practice accessory is a metronome, which you can use to keep time at a certain rate (beats per minute, or bpm). Rhythm is so important in music, and using a metronome in your daily practice routine will help instill this sense of rhythm in you.
You can either use the old fashioned, ‘wind up’ type as shown here, or an electronic version.
Use the metronome when practicing chord sequences, or scale exercises. Start off with a very slow bpm setting, and slowly increase the speed, only when you can play it correctly at the slower speed. For certain exercises in your practice routine, keep a note of the bpm settings each day. This way, if your goal is to play the exercises faster, you can see yourself making progress over time.
- Organise Your Practice Time - Establish a Routine:
You only have a limited amount of practice time, and it’s very easy to use that time up just by doodling around, and before you know it, your practice session time is up.
Try and establish a framework for your practice time, allocating parts of the session time to different activities, e.g. warming up, scale exercises, chord practice, intervals/ear training, and playing some songs/jamming. The time you spend on each part will depend really on the time you have available in total, but the idea is to have some discipline and structure to your practice time.
- Spend Time Transcribing & Jamming:
Although it’s important to have things like scale and chord exercises in your practice routine, another very important practice area is to find some songs you like, and try and work out the chords in the song, or figure out the guitar solo.
Transcribing the chords or guitar solo like this is great ear training practice, it will help you with many aspects of guitar playing. It also adds a real fun element to your practice session. It’s all too easy to fill the whole practice session with exercises and drills, and then the whole daily practice becomes more of a chore than an enjoyable activity.
Make sure you allocate some time to playing along with songs you enjoy - presumably one of the reasons you picked up a guitar in the first place was to be able to play those songs! Don’t worry if at first it seems hard to work out what chords are being played, you’ll definitely get better the more you practice it.
There are also tools you can get for helping you with transcribing music like this, one example is Transcribe.
As well as transcribing guitar parts from songs, another important activity is just to jam along with backing tracks, especially if you’re trying to learn more lead guitar. You may not have time to always do both of these in every practice session, so try alternating between them - one day play along with some songs, another day, pick some backing tracks and jam along with those.
- Record Your Practice Sessions:
You don’t have to do it every day, but every so often, record yourself practicing the guitar. Just like using the metronome to measure your progress, by listening to recordings of previous practice sessions, you should be able to really hear an improvement over time. Hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
If you’re practicing every day, it can sometimes feel like you’re not progressing. However, just listening to a practice session from 3 months ago, should convince you that you are.
There are various ways to record your practice session, one useful tool is Audacity.
Hopefully you can use some of these suggestions in your guitar practice routine.
