Why Your Guitar Practice Doesn’t Give You Much Results

Why Your Guitar Practice Doesn’t Give You Much Results

It’s very frustrating when you spend so much time practicing guitar only to come up with little to no results. Ever wonder why this happens? Read the points below to understand why and start getting better results from your guitar practice:

You don’t practice with specific goals in mind

It’s hard to make significant progress in your guitar playing when you don’t have specific goals you are working towards. Without such goals, it is very likely that you’ll end up practicing too many things at once… leading to massive feelings of being overwhelmed. This makes practicing guitar very frustrating and unproductive. Practicing without specific goals also leads to mindless practice that never really helps you improve in any specific area. This means you might make a little progress, but you will never make massive strides to improve your playing in a short period of time.

Experts agree, setting goals is crucial for becoming a better guitarist. Setting goals for yourself is very fundamental to achieving success at anything at life. Guitar playing is no exception.

Setting musical goals for yourself not only inspires you to keep getting better, but it also helps you transform yourself into the guitarist you always wanted to be. Additionally, taking lessons with a great guitar teacher helps you not only set goals, but achieve them without getting off course.”

We agree. When you set goals for yourself, it adds tons of motivation to your practice that keeps you going until you become the guitarist you want to be.

The more specific you are with the goals you set, the easier it is to set a clear path for what you need to learn, how to practice and what things to prioritize in your practice. If you don’t know all these things after setting your goals, don’t worry. Most guitarists do not understand them without expert guidance. This makes finding an experienced guitar teacher especially helpful for reaching your goals.

You practice skills in isolation but never integrate them together

It’s a big mistake to practice all your guitar skills in isolation from one another. Why? Playing guitar well is a matter of being able to combine everything you know together. Without this skill, you struggle to play some things when you have mastered others, making you feel like a total beginner (this is very frustrating). For instance, a lot of guitarists learn how to play as fast as possible but never learn how to actually use this speed to create good phrases/solos. The result is fast playing that sounds like noise whenever put into the context of a solo. In this case, one solution is to practice phrasing some of the scales/licks that one has mastered at high speeds in order to have better skill with playing musical sounding solos. There are many approaches to this, and a great guitar teacher can show you all of them.

Professional guitar teacher and music career mentor, Tom Hess agrees: “You become unbalanced as a guitar player when you can’t use your skills together. Practicing everything in isolation leads to this problem. Instead of doing this, find creative ways to practice different skills together. Better yet, find a guitar teacher who can show you how to do this effectively.”

You don’t track your progress

Another guitar practice mistake is to not track your progress. Without tracking your progress, it is nearly impossible to know for sure if what you are doing is working or not. To learn how to effectively do this, ask your guitar teacher how to track specific areas of your guitar playing.

Apply what you’ve learned in this article and watch as you get much better results from your guitar practice!