See if this sounds familiar: to learn to play guitar at a very high level, you may have been practicing various guitar skills and techniques for months or even years.
Yet after all this time practicing, you still get lost when improvising, playing in front of others, or trying to record music.
Even though you keep studying and learning new things, it seems it doesn't solve your problems.
So why aren't you getting better at guitar despite having so much determination? Simply put: you haven't achieved guitar playing fluency.
This means that you might understand and even be able to use many different skills on guitar, but you aren't able to blend these skills together.
The main reason why this happens is most guitarists always practice guitar exercises just to get it right once and then want to move onto something "new".
This hurts their ability to integrate guitar skills together and play fluently.
Compare this with the average student taking an exam at school.
Instead of actually studying the material and learning from it, many students merely attempt to "pass the test" and quickly forget everything once it's over.
Don't be this kind of student.
Until you fully understand how to practice guitar to get the best results, you'll always struggle with mastering individual skills in your guitar playing.
Guitarists Who May Never Become Great Fall Into These Two Categories The first group is composed of guitarists who don't focus on mastering any single skill - they constantly hunt for new things to learn.
This kind of approach prevents you from getting better at guitar because it does not integrate your guitar skills together (more on this later).
The second group is composed of guitarists who are perfectionists.
They attempt to master every single individual aspect of a certain guitar skill before moving on to practice a different one.
Truth is, you will NEVER master any guitar skill by practicing it in total isolation.
The best you can hope for when doing this is ending up with a bunch of guitar skills that you can't use it when it really counts.
After realizing how much time you spent practicing skills in isolation, you will only end up frustrated.
Now that you know what does NOT work - the following is the exact guitar practice process that every great guitarist goes through when mastering any new skill: 1.
Learn a new skill in isolation.
Application or fluency is not the goal at this point, so don't worry about it yet.
Most guitarists do this step...
but they never move on from it.
2.
Take the skill you learned in the previous step and practice applying it.
Imitate a real-life playing situation.
For instance: as soon as you learn a new guitar lick, apply it by improvising with it over a backing track - creating many new variations of the lick using all the techniques you are familiar with.
3.
Start integrating what you've learned into all other areas of your guitar playing.
This is the crucial step that will build or destroy your guitar playing fluency.
To practice integration, focus on using many different skills at once while training them together.
There are thousands of ways to do this.
Here's just one example: Play an ascending scale sequence using legato and come back down with a sweep picking arpeggio, or add additional notes to the scale and/or the arpeggio to create a new lick...
or maybe you could combine lead guitar phrases with rhythm guitar riffs while playing over a chord progression that modulates through different keys...
To finally achieve guitar playing fluency you MUST practice integrating guitar skills, regardless of which level your guitar skills are at.
Not having the ability to integrate guitar skills together is one of the biggest and most limiting problems holding most guitar players back from becoming much better.
4.
Measure and improve your new skills.
Return to the first step and practice the skill in isolation (again) but now with a deeper understanding of which areas of the skill must be improved.
Then go to step 2 and 3...
Then repeat the cycle over again.
This will help you improve your guitar playing fluency at a faster rate.
ATTENTION: Avoid falling into the perfectionist "pitfall" of spending too much time on each step, or skipping steps in order to move onto new things.
Here is what you need to do instead: - When you practice guitar, rotate your exercises so that your guitar playing is always being trained in different ways.
The best approach for doing this is developing an effective guitar practice schedule.
- Study with the best guitar teacher who understands how to filter out unnecessary materials and won't overwhelm you with too many new things to learn at once.
- Realize that improving your guitar playing fluency isn't a linear process.
Your guitar playing fluency is the final result of the overlap in four areas of guitar playing mastery.
Aim to enhance the overlap among the four areas in the previous diagram, so that they work together to reinforce each other and help you expand your levels of guitar fluency.
Here are two things that are crucial for you to get the greatest benefits out of this right now: 1.
Learn how to make your guitar practice way more effective.
2.
Let me help you implement these effective practice approaches into your playing and move you towards guitar playing mastery.