How To Practice Acoustic Guitar - Improve Your Guitar Playing

Learning HOW to practice your acoustic guitar so that you can consistently improve your guitar playing is one of the most important things that you need to know.

Yes, it is important to be practicing your guitar each day, but just simply picking it up and playing is not going to guarantee you the results that you are after. You need to make sure that you are doing the right things when practicing your guitar, and today I want to share with you some extremely effective ways to go about this.

Know What You Want To Achieve When Practicing Your Guitar Playing

If you don’t know where you are going then how are you going to get there?

There are so many things that you can practice on the acoustic guitar alone, that you simply don’t have enough lifetimes to cover them all. You need to know what it is you want to be able to do with your guitar playing. 

This could be as simple as being able to play through some of your favorite songs, or becoming a virtuoso in fingerstyle guitar playing on your acoustic guitar.

Both of these goals are valid and each will lead to particular things that you will need to practice to improve your guitar playing. And this is the point:

When you know what you want to be able to do, then it will dictate exactly what you need to practice.  

It is not necessary to overcome every weakness in your guitar playing, just those that stop you from doing what you want to be able do.

Things You Need To Do When Practicing Your Guitar

Knowing what you want with your guitar playing is great, but you also need to know HOW to get there. Here are a couple of key things, that if you do, will improve your guitar playing dramatically.

Slowing It Down

You must practice things SLOWLY! This is one of the most common mistakes that guitarists repeatedly make. If you try and play the things you are learning too quickly, you will only succeed in reinforcing mistakes and bad technique. 

Slow is fast, meaning that if you practice things on your guitar slowly, your fingers will learn the correct way to do things. You will then be able to play at much faster tempo’s.

Making mistakes is fine and part of learning but never reinforce them.

Breaking It Up Into Small Parts At A Time

If I gave you a full A4 size page of writing to memorize, how would you do it? Would you try and memorize it in one big chunk? You could, but it would prove very difficult to do.

It would be much better to break it up into smaller parts to get it down, and learning songs and the like on your guitar is no different. 

When practicing on your guitar, you must break the things you are working on up into smaller chunks. Your brain and fingers will absorb things much more effectively this way. Muscle memory will develop better and you can then go about joining these things together again when ready.

Record Yourself

A great thing to do when practicing your guitar playing is to record yourself doing it. This is one of the best ways you can improve your guitar playing in MASSIVE ways!

This idea is twofold:

1. You will be able to listen back and see just how effectively your guitar practice really is. Are you playing everything clearly? Are you playing slow enough and in small enough chunks to be executing things consistently well? Are you working on the problem areas of a riff or song or just playing what you can already play?

You may be surprised that no is the answer to a lot of these questions. Better to  know this so that you can do something about it.

2. Recording yourself playing in your practice time is a great way to measure your progress as you can compare back to other earlier recordings and really hear the improvement you are making with your guitar playing along the way.

This will develop a real sense of belief that you ARE improving with your guitar playing. This belief in yourself is the number one thing you need to become a great guitar player.

Maximum Focus And A Schedule To Follow

Turn off your phone, shut down your email, and logout of facebook. Let people know you are not to be disturbed unless the house is on fire. You need to set up the right kind of environment in which to practice your guitar. It will make a huge difference to the results that you get.

There should be two things that exist in the world when practicing your guitar, you, and your guitar.

Having a guitar practice schedule is essential too. Here is an example of one below:

Guitar Practice Schedule

In the practice schedule above, notice that I have rotated things across the week. You don’t need to practice everything everyday, but you do need to play most, if not everyday, to improve your guitar playing. Picking up your guitar once or twice a week, even for long periods of time is not enough to develop the muscle memory required to play it.

Knowing what you are going to practice on your guitar in advance each day, hence the schedule, is also crucial to be making sure you are getting the most out of the time you are investing into your guitar playing. It will go along way to helping you focus on what it is you need to do.

You want to be smart when going about practicing your guitar. Following these methods will ensure that you get more out of 20 minutes of practice, or whatever time you set aside each day, than someone else who just picks up the guitar and noodles around on it for whatever length of time.

Happy practicing! :)

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