If there is “one” thing about guitar practicing that is “most important”, it’s that there is NO single “right” guitar practice method. In order to overcome a variety of guitar practice problems and reach a wide range of musical goals, you need to use multiple effective approaches to see results in the shortest amount of time.

To help you maximize your guitar practice efficiency and effectiveness, read below to learn 7 of the best guitar practice tips and strategies to use to become a better guitarist right now.

1. Discover The Reasons Behind Your Guitar Playing Challenges The single most important thing you must learn to do if you want to get consistent results from your guitar practice is to learn to identify the sources of all guitar playing problems you face. Most commonly, guitarists aren’t able to specifically pinpoint the exact reasons why they struggle to play something on guitar, and at best they are only vaguely aware that some problem “exists”. In order to get crystal clear about what is causing you to struggle to play something, make the challenging part even MORE difficult by making greater demands on your picking hand or fretting hand (or both). This will bring the problem (or problems) into clearer focus. Check out the video below where I demonstrate an example of one of the ways to do this on guitar:

To learn more about the practicing approach described in the video, visit this page about guitar practice advice.

2. Track How Much Progress Is Being Made In Your Guitar Playing Ultimately, you need to know whether or not your guitar practicing efforts are bringing you the results you want. You will need to measure not only the obvious skills (such as your speed of playing with a metronome) but also the intangible areas of your creativity, improvising and phrasing. One of the ways you can track your progress with the latter areas is by recording yourself and listening to your playing over time.

Knowing how well your guitar playing is improving will let you know if/when anything needs to be adjusted to make your guitar practicing more effective. Unfortunately, few guitar players ever track their progress “over time” (that means CONSISTENTLY) and this is one of the main reasons why most have no idea what they need to do to start seeing greater results in their guitar playing.

3. Know What You Are Going To Achieve Each Time You Pick Up The Guitar To Practice To maximize your guitar practice results, you need to start each session by clearly defining specific results you intend to reach when you are done practicing. This will help your concentration to stay high and will direct all your efforts towards making that goal a reality. Doing this will help you to keep track of your results and know exactly what aspects of your practicing may need to improve or be refined further.

4. Learn How To Create Guitar Exercises Out Of Everything You Practice When you find yourself struggling to play something on guitar, there are often a variety of reasons why that is the case. However, most people simply “assume” (or guess) what the problem is and therefore are not likely to find the correct solutions to their challenges.

To prevent this, make exercises out of the very music you are learning on guitar. Isolate the sections that are challenging to play and treat them as “exercises” for improving your general guitar playing. This is a much more efficient way to allocate your limited practice time.

To be clear, I am not implying that you must abandon all guitar exercises you practice, I’m only saying that most of the time you already have the exact exercises you should be working on within the songs and solos you are practicing.

5. Practice For Greater Efficiency In Your Picking Hand Technique You will always improve in every aspect of your guitar playing by making your picking hand technique better – no matter how advanced your guitar technique is right now. The single fastest way to do this is to learn how to make your picking motions very efficient and economical (without sacrificing tone). To see an effective practicing approach for developing this skill, study this guitar picking techniques video.

6. Have A Clear Vision For “How” EVERY Practice Item Is Helping Your Guitar Playing Most guitar players have no shortage of “exercises to practice”, but few guitarists ever give much thought to the role each of those items plays on their musical development. To test if you are one of such guitarists, go through your list of practice items and ask: “What is this doing for my guitar playing?” for every exercise. Like most players you will likely find that you are not able to clearly articulate the reasons why you are spending time on certain guitar practice materials. This leads to several problems:

• Lack of clarity over your rate of musical improvement. When you are not sure what results you should be expecting, it becomes impossible to measure them.
• Slow overall progress. Since you never took the time to select specific exercises for your “specific” guitar challenges, any results that come from your practicing happen largely on a “hit-or-miss” basis.

To solve this problem once and for all, ask yourself the basic test question for every exercise you plan to include into your practicing to determine how much it is helping you to progress towards your ultimate goals.

7. Group All Guitar Exercises By The Goal They Help You Work Towards To maximize your rate of progress on guitar, you must break down your guitar playing goals into a series of steps to go through in order to achieve your objectives. To increase your efficiency in going through this process, you must sort all guitar practice items you are working on into groups based on what result they help you to achieve. This is important for a number of reasons:

A. You will be growing in several simultaneous areas of guitar playing in an intelligent and predictable (rather than “random”) way. By knowing exactly what skills a certain guitar practice item is helping you improve, you will be less likely to end up out of balance in your playing. B. Having the clarity described above will help you to avoid making your practicing a monotonous process. If you have multiple exercises in each group, you can rotate between them at any time, keeping your practicing focused on the same general objectives without spending too long on any single item.

Armed with what you have learned from this article, begin using these strategies in your guitar practice sessions, starting TODAY! If you are consistent in applying this guitar practice advice into your playing, you will soon see your results on guitar and your confidence in your ability to reach your goals improve like never before.

About the author: Mike Philippov is a recording artist, guitar teacher and author. His articles on practicing guitar are read worldwide. Visit http://PracticeGuitarNow.com to find more free articles on practicing guitar and lessons on improving your guitar playing.

Have you been experiencing a lack of motivation in your guitar practice? Are you unsure about what and how to practice? Do you wish you could practice guitar effectively and get better results? If so, you are not alone. It take most guitar players many years before they learn how to practice guitar in a way that is both productive and enjoyable.

As a guitar teacher, I come across all kinds of guitar playing issues through my guitar students. Over the years, I have noticed that most of my guitar students have very specific reasons for why they lose motivation for guitar practice. In order to help you increase your motivation, I have created a list of the 5 most common reasons why guitar players are unable to get great results when they practice guitar:

Reason Number 1: Not having fun with guitar practice

Many guitar players have conditioned themselves to believe that guitar practice is nothing more than a boring set of repetitive tasks. If you have this mindset, you are truly misunderstanding the basic idea behind guitar practice. In order to gain motivation to practice your instrument, you must learn how to create an effective practice schedule that helps you enjoy the learning process as you work toward your guitar playing goals. Once you obtain the right tools to create a such a highly productive and inspirational practice schedule, you will find it much easier to have fun with the time you spend practicing guitar. When you learn how to practice guitar so effectively that you see yourself getting better on a regular basis, it becomes much easier to look forward to your next guitar practice session.

To gain more insight on how you can have more fun while practicing guitar with greater motivation, check out this guitar practice methods article.

Reason Number 2: Not sure what needs to be practiced on guitar.

The majority of guitar players do not know exactly what they should be practicing and why they should be practicing it. This causes them to attempt learning as many new ideas on guitar as possible. Then, by practicing so many different ideas for guitar at once, the guitarist becomes overwhelmed. This happens because they simply do not give themselves enough time to fully process all the new information they are learning.

The key to practicing guitar effectively is to fully understand ‘what’ you must practice and ‘why’ you must practice it. Understand what you should be practicing on guitar by checking out this unique article about manifesting musical goals.

Reason Number 3: Not focusing enough on long term goals.

It takes many years to become a great guitar player. If you want to become a great guitarist, you must clearly determine the best paths to take in order to achieve your long term goals. Once you have clearly identified your long term music goals, you will need to focus on using your guitar practice time effectively to reach them. To illustrate a point, think of each of your guitar practice sessions as separate pieces of a puzzle that make up the big picture of your guitar playing goals. The more clearly you can see the big picture that you are trying to create, the easier it will be to think of ways to effectively practice guitar.

Reason Number 4: Losing motivation due to lack of quick progress.

Even if you understand the best way to effectively practice guitar, you will not achieve big results overnight. Many guitar players expect instant results when using a new practice method. Unfortunately, when they do not get the quick results they are looking for, they end up abandoning (what might be) a truly effective guitar practice method. This results in inconsistent guitar playing progress since you do not give yourself the time to get the benefits from the guitar practice methods you use. This practicing method is like listening to 15 different songs, but stopping the music after one or two seconds in each song before you can hear what the music is about. When practicing guitar, give your practice methods time to develop so that you can determine whether or not the methods are effective.

Reason Number 5: Unorganized and ineffective practicing habits

Most guitarists practice in a totally unorganized and ineffective manner. Unfortunately, they are usually unaware of this and go for weeks, months, or even years at a time using the same ineffective guitar practice methods! One example of a commonly used, yet ineffective method is the idea of using an equal amount of time on every task in your guitar practice. This is just like trying to prepare a dish by using an equal amount of ingredients without thinking about how each of the ingredients will affect the taste of the food. This guitar practice method will cause you to spend too much time on things that are not important to your overall guitar playing progress.

Another mistake that guitarists make during their guitar practice is that they spend a lot of time focusing on the guitar skills they WANT to practice rather than the guitar skills that they NEED to practice in order to achieve their musical goals. This causes their guitar playing skills to become imbalanced. As a result, their weak areas tend to hold back their ability to apply their well developed skills in musical situations.

In order to make progress in your guitar playing, it is essential to analyze your own practice methods so that you can develop an effective guitar practice schedule. To build a highly effective guitar practice routine, fill out the questions in this effective guitar practice assessment.

What should you do next?

After reading this article, you should have a better understanding of why you have a hard time staying motivated in your guitar practice. Think about how the guitar practice solutions mentioned above can apply to your current practice routine. Even though this article has only touched on a few of the problems that you might face as you develop your guitar skills, your guitar playing will benefit greatly by applying them in your everyday practice.

Learn more about the things you should be practicing during your guitar practice time by studying the information in this unique manifesting musical goals article. If you have yet to take the assessment on effective guitar practice, do this now and get personalized advice to help you improve your guitar practice methods.

About The Author: Tom Hess is a successful professional guitar player, composer and the guitarist of the band Rhapsody Of Fire. He trains rock guitarists to reach their goals in music in his electric guitar lessons online. Visit his guitar lessons website to read more articles about becoming a better guitar player.