Why Most Guitar Players Stay Stuck

If you've been playing the guitar for years and you still feel stuck every time you sit down to practice, here's probably why. Most players don't have a practice system in place. They sit down and they just bounce between random scales, licks, exercises, and YouTube videos, and then they wonder why they're not improving. So today I'm going to be showing you a very simple 3-part practice system that has helped so many of my students make more progress on the guitar in one year than they have in the past 5, 10, or even 20. And if you'll stay till the end, I'm going to be showing you 3 mistakes that I see guitar players making in their practice over and over again. And if you will just fix these 3 things, you are going to be on the fast track to developing some amazing skills on the guitar. By the way, if you'd like a little PDF that has some graphics and has some more information about helping you stay on track in your practice, I have put that together for you and you can check it out in the video description and in the top pinned comment. All right, so let's jump into it here. Aaron, what is the 3-part practice system? It's pretty common sense here, but it eludes a lot of players. So it's just 3 parts here. Number 1, warm-up/technique. Number 2 is repertoire. And number 3, I'm calling development. Okay, so again, it's warm-up/technique, repertoire, and development. Okay, so let's go into the first part of the 3-part practice system, warm-up/technique. This pretty self-explanatory here, but we want to get the blood flowing in our hands. We want to kind of clean the rust off of our chops, so to speak, and we also want to oil the machinery of our technique. So this is a great thing to do every day whenever you pick up the guitar. Now, I have shared no shortage of lessons around picking exercises on this channel, so I'm going to be linking to a lot of these videos down in the video description. You can go and check those out if you're wanting the specific, like, what to practice, I've got all of that for you here on the channel. But again, remember, we want to warm up. We want to get the blood flowing in our hands. We don't want to just come out and, you know, start sprinting without, you know, warming up here. So we want to do that. But then also with the technique exercises, just remember that the purpose of practicing these is to oil the machinery of our technique, which helps us better play the music that we want to play. So depending on where you're at as a player, I might recommend a different set of exercises. Exercises. So one of the things that I always ask people— and again, this was something we did on the last Flatpicking Path Challenge— was like question number 1: can you play at least 10 either fiddle tunes or bluegrass solos cleanly and in time at 80 beats per minute without having to do a whole lot of review? Okay, if the answer is no to that question, I really recommend practicing some simple picking exercises and practicing those in time. And working through some of these exercises right here is a great thing to do. Now, if you answered yes to that question, you're a little bit more of an advanced player. Working through some of these exercises is a great thing to do. So for the simple exercises, it's just those kinds of exercises. For the more advanced ones, it's doing like cross picking or like deliberate string skipping.— or like doing these kinds of exercises, which sound terrible but are effective. Okay? Either way though, you want to get the blood flowing and we want to oil the machinery of our technique. So that's the first part in the 3-part practice system: warm-up/technique. Now, number 2: repertoire. With repertoire, this is learning tunes, This is learning note-for-note solos. This can even be working on phrases and licks because that's a part of our vocabulary which we're going to use in the repertoire. So again, tunes, fiddle tunes, note-for-note solos, solos to bluegrass standards that you've maybe learned on this channel from me, or even working on specific licks and phrases that we're going to use in our vocabulary. But here's the thing, this is where a lot of people go wrong here. The goal with repertoire always, always is memorization. Always. If you have to look at tabs when playing something, you do not know it well enough. Let me say that one more time: if you have to look at tabs when playing something, you do not know it well enough. I didn't realize how many people were way, way, way too dependent on tabs until I started teaching exclusively online, because when I used to teach local in-person guitar lessons, I would make my students memorize whatever we were working on in the lesson. I would make them do it. They would play through it a couple of times, and once they had it down, I would just take their sheet music, their tabs, away from them, and we would just play it over and over and over until they got it. But whenever I moved all of my teaching online, it was just blowing my mind how many people are dependent on tabs. So again, I don't care what it is that you're working on, whether that's a fiddle tune, whether that's, you know, like a solo to Little Cabin Home on the Hill, whether that's a Tony Rice or Billy Strings solo, whether that's a couple of licks and phrases, memorization is always the goal. Now, here's the good news, and I have seen this with a lot of my students. I have a lot of data on this. About an hour to an hour and a half of focused practice a day should get you a new tune learned, memorized, and committed to muscle memory in one week. I have a lot of data with this. I have seen this with a lot of my students. An hour to an hour and a half of distraction-free focus should be enough time for you to get something learned, memorized, and committed to muscle memory in one week. If it takes you a little bit longer, that's totally okay. So this really became apparent to me a couple of weeks ago. I was doing a VIP day with my student Chuck Hausner. Chuck has been learning from my material for a while now. He's had my Flatpicking Mastery Course for a while, and he was a part of my Pickers Insider Circle group that I hosted last year, and I ended up having to shut it down this year. But I've known Chuck for a while and we've worked on some things, but he came and he did an in-person VIP day with me this year. And I've done about 5 of those this year. It's the first time I've offered it. And that's where students get 8 hours of my time one-on-one in person. I go and rent a beautiful Airbnb cabin here in the mountains in East Tennessee, and we just have the whole day to hang out, jam, pick, learn tunes, talk. It's just an absolute blast. If that's something you'd be interested in doing, I do have a link link down in the video description. You have to apply for it. If you're selected, we'll jump on a Zoom call to discuss all of the details. But Chuck and I had a great time playing together. We spent a couple of hours just jamming and working on some licks, but then we sat down and I had him go through and learn a brand new tune. And the tune that we worked on was East Tennessee Blues. And so We sat down, and he had never played it before, and we just sat down. I had my computer there, we opened up the guitar profile, and long story short, he essentially got the whole tune, the A and the B part, learned and nearly memorized in less than 1 hour in 1 day. So that was a whole tune learned, and he nearly committed it to memory in 1 hour. And if you'll just rinse and repeat and then just keep practicing that new tune and commit it to muscle memory. With an hour to an hour and a half a day, you can pretty much learn a new tune every week. That's just something to keep in mind with the repertoire side. Remember, we always want to be striving for memorization, but a focused hour to an hour and a half a day should get you about 8 to 16 bars of music learned, memorized, and committed to muscle memory in one week. Related to this too, I do recommend that you learn the chords for these tunes if you don't already know them. That is very, very important because you're gonna need that if you ever go out and jam and play this music with people, which I certainly hope you do because this music is meant to be played with people. You do also want to commit the chords and the rhythm to memory. And then one thing that also pops up here when I'm talking about repertoire, inevitably people ask me about review, because as you go through and if you're learning like a new tune every week, before too long you're gonna build up a pretty substantial repertoire of tunes. And people are like, what do we do for review? So there's a couple of different things that you can do with review. Number 1, you can have a little bit of time allotted every single day to reviewing. Again, I don't really consider that a part of your practice system because you're going back and you're doing review, but if that's something that you want to do every day, which is, you know, review old tunes, that's a great thing that you can do every day. One of the other things I really recommend students do is just have one day a week that you just use as a review day. Just go through and blow the dust off of tunes that you had previously learned. Now here's the thing: if you're doing what I'm showing you to do here and you're really focusing and you're committing these to muscle memory, even if previous tunes that you had learned aren't top of mind, whenever you go back and review, you'll be surprised at how quickly your brain remembers that because you committed it to muscle memory. And even if it's not top of mind, it's still in there, I promise you. So another option is to have a review week once a month. So, you know, if there's 4 to 5 weeks in a month, maybe you learned 3 or 4 new tunes, maybe you just spend the last week of of the month just going through and again blowing the dust off of those tunes and just practicing them, committing them to muscle memory, and making sure that they don't go stale. But the best thing that you can do honestly is have some kind of jam where you go and you play these tunes with people. That's really the best way to keep these tunes from getting stale. Now I know that not everybody has a weekly jam that they can go to, but something like that once a week or twice a month that you can go to and play these tunes with other people is going to keep you from forgetting these tunes, and it's going to help them stay top of mind. Okay, so we've covered 2 parts in our 3-part practice system. Number 1, warm-up and technique, because we want to get the blood flowing and we want to oil the machinery of our technique. Number 2, repertoire, with the goal of memorization. And remember, like I said, an hour to an hour and a half of focused practice per week should be enough to get 8 to 16 bars of music learned and memorized in one week. Okay, so that brings us to the third part of our 3-part practice system, which is development. So for me, development really kind of falls into 2 categories. You can prioritize one over the other, or you can even do both depending on how much time that you have to practice. So number 1, and this is probably what most people should be doing, is just ironing out the kinks to difficult parts. What I mean by that is as you go through and you're learning learning, again, the tune, the solo, the phrase, the lick, there is inevitably going to be one part in there that's giving you more trouble than the other parts are. Now, what most people do is they just kind of continue to play the whole tune in its full context, and whenever they get to that part, they just kind of slop through it and hope that this time around when they play it, that it'll get better and it'll get easier. And, um, that's kind of extent there. But I'm telling you, if you really want to improve, what you want to do is take those difficult parts and isolate them and play them over and over and over again. And that's going to iron out the kinks. So a couple of different examples here. On the more simple side of things, um, let's say you're learning just the basic melody to Red Haired Boy, and you're learning kind of the, like, the last phrase to the A and the B part, which goes— now when people are new to this stuff and they're learning that part that's a pretty challenging part. So one good thing to do is to just take that part and play it over and over and over again. And by over and over and over again, I don't mean 2 or 3 times. I mean 30 to 50 times and do it every single day. So that's one example there. Here's a couple of other examples here. I've taught Tony Rice's solo to How Mountain Girls Can Love on this channel, and the phrase that he ends that solo with is just a monster run, and it goes like a— something like that. Okay, so whenever I was first learning that solo, I would just take that phrase and just— and then just play Play it again. Okay, and I would play that 30, 40, 50 times a day until I got the kinks ironed out of that. So that is a great thing to do on the development side. Take the smallest part of that tune— it might just be 1 or 2 bars of music that are giving you trouble— isolate it, play it over and over and over and over again and again. That's going to iron out the wrinkles to that difficult part, and it's going to make the tune or solo that you're playing sound much, much much better. And then another great thing to focus on in the development part is building speed. Now, like I said with the exercises, there are no shortage of speed building lessons on this channel. You can check some of those out right here, and I will link to them down in the video description. So I'm not going to go back into the specifics here, but I've shown you how you can take chunks of tunes that you're working on, use them to increase the tempo, and use them to build speed. I've shown you a bunch of different licks that you can use specifically for building speed, and again, you can check some of those out down in the video description. But again, whether you're taking a difficult part of the tune and you're wanting to iron out the wrinkles and iron out the kinks and make the whole tune sound more polished, or whether you're wanting to build speed, it does involve much smaller pieces of music played over and over and over and over again. And by that, I mean at least 30 times. 50 times a day would be even better. My student Dave Saleh, who I've given Dave a bunch of shoutouts on this channel because Dave is awesome, um, I was talking to him a couple of ago, and he said just by adding this to his practice routine, just by taking difficult parts, isolating them, and playing them 50 times a day, he made more progress in one year on the guitar than he had, I think, in the past 10. So just by adding this one element to his practice routine, he made insane progress on the guitar in one year. So y'all, that is the long and the short of it. That's the 3-part practice system: warm-up/technique, repetoire with the goal of memorization, and development—either ironing out the kinks to difficult parts of the tune that you're working on or building speed. So inevitably, people are going to ask, Aaron, what about improvisation? And I'm going to give an answer that most people are not going to want to hear, and it's this: most people who are watching this channel do not need to even be thinking about bluegrass improvisation. You don't even need to be thinking about it. Why? The reason is, is because in order to consistently and confidently improvise in bluegrass, your timing, technique, repertoire, and vocabulary have got to be so strongly developed that all of those things are at a point of unconscious competence, meaning you can do all of them without having to think about it, because that is what you're going to pull from whenever you're coming up with these types of leads and solos on the fly. But again, the good news is this: if you are practicing those things— technique, timing, repertoire, vocabulary, all of that good stuff— you're setting the foundation and building what you need to build to be able to improvise later down the road. And I am going to be sharing a lot more videos on this channel around improvisation, but just know that for now, for most people watching this channel, your time is going to be much better spent working on technique, timing, repertoire, and vocabulary. Okay, so 3 big mistakes that I see guitar players making in their practice. Number 1 is just not having any type of practice system. That's what I mentioned at the beginning of this video, and I really hope that this lesson has been able to solve that. But for the players who do decide to sit down every day and come up with a focused practice routine, here is what I see so many of them doing. They want to spend most of their time on picking exercises. Let me say that again. They want to spend most of their time on picking exercises. So let's go back to this, the 3-part practice system. Again, warm-up/technique, repertoire, and development. 20 to 30% of your practice time should be spent on warm-up/technique and development. 70 to 80% of your practice time should be spent on repertoire. Okay, let's say that again. 20 to 30% of your time should be spent on the warm-up, the technique part, and the development part. 70 to 80% of your practice time should be spent on repertoire. Most people practicing this stuff get that backwards. They spend 80 to 90% of their time on picking exercises and 10 to 20% on the repertoire, on the tunes. That is backwards. And again, the only reason we do picking exercises is to oil the machinery of our technique, and hopefully that makes the music that we're trying to play a little easier to execute. So please remember that, and please take that with you: 20 to 30% of your practice time on technique and on development, 70 to 80% of your time on repertoire. So that's two big mistakes that I see. Number one is just not having a practice system, and number two, spending most of their time on picking exercises. And then number three, they just don't stick to it for a long enough period of time to make it a habit. They just don't. But I promise you, if you will take this three-part practice system and you will commit to making it a habit— how do you do that? Stick to it every day for 60 days. That's it. That's the long and the short of it. People overcomplicate this stuff. Just stick to it for 60 days. That's about how long you'll need to turn it into a habit. If you will stick to this and you will implement this practice system and you will make it a habit, you are going to make some great progress in your guitar playing. It is going to be awesome. There it is. That's the 3-part practice system: warm-up/technique, repertoire development. Spend 20 to 30% of your time on the warm-up, the technique, and the development part. Spend 70 to 80% of your time on the repertoire part of the system. System. I want to thank you for hanging out today. I promise you, this is one of the more important lessons that I've shared on this channel, and if you'll implement what I'm talking about in this, you're going to make some tremendous strides in your guitar playing. I promise you. As always, I want to thank you for hanging out, and I'll see you next time.