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accountability, daily routine, essential, feeling, frustration, guitar, knowledge, mind magic, motivation, music, playing, practice, practice tips, quitting, scales, song, songwriting, structure, Students, technique, the secret, visualisation - April 20, 2022

My 9 Essential Guitar Practice Tips

Learning the guitar is just like learning to swim, you make time and practice
otherwise you may drown. The questions I get most are 'how long should I practice for, and what do I practice? These 2 questions come up in every conversation that I have with new students about learning the guitar.

That answer is really dependent upon what sort of guitar player you would like to
become. If you just want to play a few chords, then you may not want to put in the thousands of hours, it would take to master the guitar.

Regardless of the type of player, we all need structure in our practicing, and we need to discipline ourselves to make it happen on a daily basis.

Below are my 9 essential tips for creating a better guitar practicing routine.

Understanding Song Structure & Forms

So, you practice your ass off with licks and arpeggios, but you soon realize that all of these scales and and other 'shredderings' are useless unless you put them into a song. So how do you do that? Well, if chord progressions are the building blocks of a song, then understanding a songs' structure and form is the blueprint you must be able to read.

The Difference Between Just Playing Music And Feeling The Music !

This past week I asked one of my best students to give me a question that he would like answered in my blog.

A) It helps me to know if there is anything we need to go over, so as to better help him, and

B) I get an opportunity to help anyone else with the same or similar issue. Not a bad pay off really.

We'll call my student Jimmy (for anonymity).

So Jimmy wanted to know, “What is the difference between just playing the music and really feeling the music that you're playing?

Guitar Frustration! When is it ok to QUIT?

Are you on the verge of quitting the guitar because you're getting frustrated with it?

I had a student the other day that I believe was on the verge of quitting the guitar. I've been teaching him for some while now, but without much success. It seems that every time he arrives for his lesson, the same conversation ensues before we even get started, I will ask him how his practice has gone over the past week, to which he replies.." I'm making progress, but you may not agree that I have made progress at all!" I've tried not asking him

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