5 Tips to Save YEARS of Guitar Practice

[00:00] In this video, we're going to go over five tips that if you actually implement will shave years off of your guitar learning curve. If you're tired of vague advice like trust the process and remember to have fun and you're ready for actionable steps, let's get started.

[00:12] The first tip is to only practice what you're bad at. This one seems obvious, but there are guitar players who waste minutes and hours every day, which compound into years, playing stuff they've already mastered. You need to be absolutely ruthless with how you spend your time in a focused practice session.

[00:27] Let me grab a guitar and show you guys how insanely specific you should be about what you're practicing. So one of the songs I recommend all the time is Sultans of Swing and the main riff goes like this.

[00:43] A common point of struggle is that final phrase starting with the slide this part. It's easy to think I'm struggling with the main riff of Sultans of Swing, but that's not true. You're only struggling with that final phrase.

[00:55] Don't be afraid to let your practice look and sound really weird. Your practice for this part might look something like this.

[01:07] And so on. I'm not playing the whole riff. I've mastered the other whole part of the riff. I'm just playing the part I'm struggling with. If you give me this specific and this merciless about cutting stuff out of your practice routine that you don't need, you can expect to progress really quickly. Let's move on.

[01:21] Tip number two, always have a plan. I don't mean this in a vague, it's a good idea to set goals kind of way. I mean you should at all times have a list of the next five things you need to get good at. Now if you don't know what those next five things should be

[01:34] or your goals for guitar aren't that specific, check out my guitar learning roadmap. Bit of a shameless plug here, but it's an exact 64-point list that I occasionally update that'll take you from being an absolute beginner into an advanced player.

[01:47] And if you don't like my list, that's fine. You can come up with your own list, but my point is you should have a list. If you want to fail at guitar and waste a lot of time, I guarantee the way to achieve that is to sit down with the guitar and then open up YouTube and spend hours scrolling endlessly, trying to find like the perfect lesson video.

[02:01] You don't even really know what you're looking for. Get a list. Tip three is get the right gear. This sounds like a snobby point, but it's not. Hear me out. I'm not saying that you got to go spend thousands on some custom shop guitar to have the right gear,

[02:14] but I am going to go ahead and define a bad guitar as one that does not get you excited to play. And I'm not tying that to price point or brand or anything like that, but what I am saying is that you should be able to look across the room at your guitar,

[02:26] like I am right now. And you should just think it's awesome. There's sometimes this attitude in the guitar community that like any guitar, no matter how crappy or unexciting to you, can get the job done. And I'm going to rant about this for a second, but like, what does that even mean?

[02:40] If the job we're trying to get done is playing music, I don't know. My phone does that. The goal here is to play guitar because it's fun. All right, the guitar should be a part of that fun. And I'm not advocating that anybody ruined their financial future, but, you know,

[02:53] if you're into a certain brand, like if you wanted to be a fender and not a squire, because you like Eric Clapton, and he didn't play a squire, you know, he played a fender, and that's part of the fun for you. That's perfectly legitimate. Maybe you don't care about brand, and you just wanted to be painted in your favorite color.

[03:07] That's perfectly legitimate. The fact of the matter is 90% of people are going to quit guitar in the first year, and you need every little advantage you can get. And if part of that advantage is that your guitar is cool, take it. Anyway, rant over. Moving on.

[03:20] Tip four is a very hands-on tip, and that is record yourself playing. If you're trying to speed up your learning process, you need as much feedback as you can get. So especially if you're self-taught, this is going to be one of the only ways you can really get feedback is by hearing yourself play and, you know, kind of giving yourself feedback.

[03:34] But even if you have an instructor, maybe you go see them once a week or something like that, your instructor isn't going to be there every practice session to give you exact feedback. You've got to try to learn how to simulate feedback for yourself, and recording yourself is the best way to do this.

[03:47] It helps magnify the mistakes that you don't hear when your focus is split between listening to yourself play and playing, and it also forces you to play through the entirety of a certain section of a song or an exercise or something, even the parts that you're not necessarily good at.

[04:02] Be like Lego Batman, and always be recording. Alfred, what did I say? A-B-R, always be recording. Tip 5 is if you can, try to play guitar with other players. Specifically, players who are maybe 10% better than you are.

[04:16] On the surface, playing guitar with other musicians helps with accountability. If you know you have a jam coming up, especially if you have a friend who plays or something, you can kind of hold each other accountable. But you're probably not going to get much out of it if the player that you're jamming with

[04:28] is at your level or below. It'll be fun, and that's cool in its own right. But again, this video is about saving your time and speeding up your learning progression. You're probably also not going to get much out of playing with somebody who's a lot better than you.

[04:40] Maybe you could learn like a little bit more than you could from somebody who's not as good as you, but if somebody's a prodigy and you're just kind of start now, they're just not going to be a lot of crossover in your skill levels. But if you can jam with somebody who's just a little better than you,

[04:52] that'll really push you forward. If they're just pretty much doing what you're doing, but a little bit more advanced, maybe a little cleaner, maybe they're playing as a little more creative, that'll show you that it's possible for you. You'll see that they're playing is like 90% similar to yours,

[05:07] but with a few easily identifiable improvements that you could actually make. Now, before we end this video, for those of you who're still watching, I want to emphasize that there's a difference between watching this video and thinking that these are good tips and actually implementing them.

[05:19] We're going to dedicate five seconds of awkwardness where I stare into your soul and impress on you the importance of actually doing this stuff.

[05:34] Anyway, a really quick summary of this list is tip one, only practice the stuff you're bad at. Tip two, always have a hyper-specific plan of what you need to learn next. Tip three, get the right gear that makes you excited about playing.

[05:47] Tip four, record yourself. And tip five, try to play with guitar players who are just a little better than you. I hope this helps and as always, thank you for watching.