Make your guitar practice more fun!
Practicing the guitar can often feel frustrating if you don’t learn how to manage it. You can have all kinds of skills that you’re trying to practice, but at the same time, you really want to be able to play more songs (after all, it’s really fun right?).
When you pick up the guitar, what do you do? Should you practice songs or skills? What if you don’t have time to do both?
These challenges are not new and I understand what it’s like to go through it (it’s happened to me many times), and this is something that every guitar player has to learn about to make practicing more fun.
I’ve found that if you don’t know about this you’ll be left feeling like your guitar playing is pulling you in two directions, which causes a sense of overwhelm, frustration, and sometimes you can feel demotivated.
To fix this, we just need to learn how to combine practicing a song with using practicing techniques to help you improve.
Using Songs To Practice Techniques:
Lets say you’re learning a song with chord changes and strumming. What are some of the skills needed?
- Chord changes
- Memorizing the chords / lyrics
- Getting clarity of sound
- Staying in time
- Being able to strum while change chords
If we learn how to practice each one of these, you are in fact improving you general guitar skills while at the same time practicing to perfect your song. Will other songs need these same skills?
Do to good at learning songs really fast, focus on core skills that are transferable to different pieces of music.
But practicing guitar technique is boring….
Often practicing guitar techniques can feel repetitive and tiresome. However, if you take pieces from music that you love, and incorporate them into your practicing technique and routine. And use specific parts to practice your technique, then it will be a lot more fun for you!
This could be anything from a sequence of notes to improve your speed, even chords that appear in the song, you can use them to practice chord changes as well.
Changing up the rhythm of a song is also a really great way of experimenting with the piece and improve your rhythm skill at the same time. Can you change the same song you are doing in in a reggae or swing rhythm instead?
The next time you’re in your guitar lesson, try and look beyond the exercise being taught and observe how you’re practicing. Once you understand this, you can use this to learn songs faster and improve your guitar playing too.
This is also a really fun way to always be relating back to why you are learning to play the guitar.
About author
Guitar Tuition East London is a guitar school that provides comprehensive and FUN lessons to both children and also adults too. With many students starting with complete beginner with no previous experience of music. They are able to help them progress in many areas to develop a love and passion of guitar.