MUST Know Guitar Practice Tips To Have MORE FUN Playing Songs Your Love

So what I'm going to talk about in this video is ways for you to structure your guitar practice so that it's more effective. And when it's more effective, you're going to see a lot more progress, a lot faster. And it doesn't have to be hours a day practicing. No, we can do this in like 10, 15, 20 minutes a day, and we can make it work. And you guys can start having a lot more fun with your guitar sooner rather than later.

I always give students this analogy. Imagine having to memorize a password that is four numbers long. Probably pretty easy for you guys to remember a four digit passcode. Most you have it on your phone. Okay? Now I say try and imagine if that passcode were 12 digits and you had to have uppercase, lowercase, little exclamation points, a little symbol here. You would never remember the password because there's so many different things. Whereas, you know, four digits is much easier to remember than 12 digits. Numbers, symbols, uppercase, lowercase. It's a lot. And that's what a lot of students do when they try to learn guitar. They try to Go for the 12 digit long password versus the 4 digit long. So this is what I do in my seven level guitar system with students. I said we're going to focus on learning a subset of skills. And I'd say the three most important fundamentals for guitar to get you playing along with songs that you know and love are chords. Okay? You need chords to actually strum along and play with songs. So we have to learn chords and we have to learn how to change between those chords pretty quickly. All right? So that our strumming sounds good. That's the next fundamental, which is timing. Okay? So timing includes strumming and, and making sure that you are in time with the music. Super, super important. You will be a much better or you will sound like a much better guitar player if you just stay in time with the music. Truly, it's a very, very important skill. And then I say picking and finger dexterity. Getting these fingers to work. So getting the picking hand to work, Getting the fretting hand to work. Okay? So, so those are the three fundamentals that we work on in every level of the course. And, you know, as you progress through the course, it gets a little bit more difficult. But what I want to instill in my students is you don't have to learn 500 things. All right? We're going to learn a few chords. The four chords that I recommend starting off learning when you're a beginner. Are E minor, G, C and D those four chords? You can do a ton with just those four chords. You can literally play thousands of songs with just those four chords. And if you focus all of your chord practice time into just changing between these four chords, as opposed to trying to learn 20 chords all at the same time, you're gonna get really good at just those four chords much quicker. And then down the road, when you start adding new chords, usually the next ones I add are A and D. So this way you have a D, E. And I show people how to play like an easy F sharp minor. You've got a new subset of chords that sounds good, but chances are that next subset of chords is going to go so much faster than the first subset of chords because your finger dexterity is much better. Alright, so you will learn chords faster as you progress. So how do we set up our practice so that it's efficient? You heard me say earlier, you don't have to practice for an hour. All right, I have one student and this is one of my in person students when I have my studio. And she came in and every week, you know, we kind of were like hitting a wall. And you know, she was an adult, she was in her 50s. And I said, you know, what's, what's going on here? Like, you know, and she, life happens, right? You get busy, you know, business. I think she had a business. And she was working overtime and there was just a lot of stuff coming up and she felt like if she didn't have an hour, at least an hour to practice, it wasn't worth practicing at all. And I was like, oh my God. I was like, no. I was like, if you do you have five minutes? And she was like, oh yeah, I have, I can do five minutes. I'm like, can we just start with five minutes? And she was like, is that really going to make a difference? And I said, absolutely, but because of the way we're going to structure the practice. So she was still a beginner. So I said on day one, we picked, I said, can you do four days a week? And she was like, yes. So we made a structure of she was going to do four days a week for five to ten minutes. If she had ten minutes. Awesome. But I was only holding her to five minutes. Day one was to practice her chords and her chord changes. All right, we would do chords change drills. So say she was working on C to G, she would spend a minute on C to G. Then she would do C to D for a minute. G to D. For a minute. G to E minor. C to E minor. And that was her five minutes of practice for chords. That's it. Great. You're done with chords for the week. The next day, she would work on strumming and timing in a strumming pattern. So say you had something like 1, 2, 3, and 4. And so this was the strumming pattern we were working on. 1, 2, 3, and 4. And 1, 2, 3 and 4. Great. Not doing anything with the fretting hand changing chords. Just 1, 2, 3, and 4. And good. Work on that for five minutes. All right. The next day. What am I doing? Oh, you're gonna work on, you know, your finger dexterity exercise. We're gonna do our spider exercise. Okay. And I just want you to. Five minutes with your picking hand and your fretting hand, coordinating your hands and getting them to work together, as well as starting to stretch out this fretting hand and getting it to move faster. Okay? So that was five days. That was day three, Five minutes of the spider exercise. And then her last day, she got to reward herself by playing a song, which we were probably working on something like Brown Eyed Girl.

Okay? It was a song that was using the chords that we were learning. G, E minor, C and D. That's all that song is, just those four chords. And then the next week, she came back, and I asked her how her practice went, and she said it went well. I did the five minutes. And she was surprised by how much progress she made by only practicing for 20 minutes in that week. And what I told her is, I said, Listen, 20 minutes is better than practicing zero. Because that's what she was doing every week. She was getting in her head that she needed these really, really long practice sessions, and it's just not true. So I tell students when you sit down to practice, and in my seven level system, I have a whole worksheet that they can fill out so that they create their perfect practice routine. But ideally, when you're setting up a practice, you want to divide it into the three fundamentals. Okay? You want to work on your chords and your chord changes for five minutes. And then five minutes, you're going to work on something with strumming and timing. And then five minutes, you're going to work on hand dexterity. I usually tell people, start with the hand dexterity because it's going to warm you up and get you started later. A lot of my students, they're older. If you guys don't know me, my name is Lauren Bateman. I help make the guitar make sense. I specialize in helping older beginners learn how to play the guitar. So if you're, you know, anyone over the age of 50, that's kind of my specialty. And what I do, and I tell them because a lot of my students have arthritis, and I say one, you know, get a warm cloth, warm up your hands, all right? Just start moving the hands. Don't even touch the guitar yet. Just start by moving the hands, get them warming up, and then start off with your spider exercise and just go slow, because I know with arthritis, you're going to have good days and bad days. And I tell them, if you're having a good day, use it. If you're having a bad day and you can only do the five minutes, perfectly fine, all right, Not a problem. My dad has really bad rheumatoid arthritis, and it's debilitating. Sometimes he can't even get up and get his hands to. He's a contractor. So it's very, very hard. So I know how you guys feel and how frustrated it can be to have arthritis. But just take your time. Start off slow with your spider exercise or whatever warm up exercise you choose for five minutes, okay? And then start moving over to your chords. Now, there's a couple different ways to practice chords, and people get confused by this a little bit, because in the beginning, you always want your chords to sound perfect, and it takes time for your chords to sound perfect. I'm just being honest with you. It could be three months, it could be six months, it could be nine months. It really depends on you and how fast we can get the fingers moving and how flexible and stretchable your hand is, too. So I tell students, when you're working on getting the chords to go faster, when we're doing these chord change exercises, focus on speed. If it sounds like this.

It'S okay as long as the fingers are landing on the right strings. That counts for me, because another part of your chord practice can be going very slow to make sure that all of the notes. Oh, if we hear a muted string, what are we going to do? We fix it. Okay? So practice slow to get perfect. Okay? If you want to be perfect, you go slow. But if you want to get fast, you have to. You absolutely have to sacrifice a little bit of the perfection. And as you get better, you'll be able to go faster. A huge practice mistake that many students make is they focus a lot on playing songs. And songs are great because they're the application of what you're learning. And, yes, they're the fun part. They're the reward. But if you just practice songs, you could be missing out on a lot of technique and foundational items. So. So that's why I tell students, like, really focus. If you focus on just this C and G chord change, you can now play that in every single song that has a C and G chord change. If you master this strumming pattern, 1, 2, 3, and 4, and.

You master that, you can use it in any song that you want to that it fits and works for. So focus on learning skills and reward yourself with the songs. Okay, you could take a day, say you're playing. You're practicing three days a week. First two days, work entirely on technique, and then that third day, reward yourself with the fun, play songs. You know, if you want to make that your long practice session, go right ahead. But the biggest thing with practice is really focusing in on the techniques that are going to help you and focusing on things in blocks of five minutes. If you do a spider exercise for five minutes straight, set a timer, because you're going to think you practiced for five minutes, and you're going to look at the timer and you're going to go, oh, that was only 30 seconds. Five minutes is a really long time when you're timing yourself. So really put in a focused five minutes on one thing, one item. Whether it be chord changes, whether it be strumming, whether it be finger dexterity, put five minutes in. And I guarantee, if you do that every week, just like my student, if that's your practice schedule, you do five minutes a day, you focus on one thing, I guarantee that 90 days from now, you will be so much better than you are today, because you're putting the repetition in. You're putting enough time and focus to actually improve. Most students, like I said, they'll do this, you know, they'll kind of go through their little spider exercise, and they're like, okay, cool, I practiced that. And it's like, what was that, 15 seconds? No, sit with it. Okay? Sit with it to the point where it gets monotonous. Well, I mean, you don't want it to get monotonous, but to the point where you can do it with your eyes closed. If you wanted to look at me, I don't even have to look at the guitar anymore. It just happens, okay? I want you guys to get to that point, but in order to get to the there, you have to put the reps in the repetition. My favorite quote from Bruce Lee. So I'm not scared of the man who knows 10,000 kicks, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. All right, that. It's that concept. And so many students, especially here on YouTube, it can be tricky because you're all over the place or, you know, you watch a video and at the end it's like, well, go watch this video. Which has nothing to do with the video you just watched. And that's why I firmly believe in setting up structured practice time. And I firmly believe in having a quality structure, whether it's my course, whether it's someone else's course. If you have a structure, if you have a blueprint, your chances of success are so much higher. So if you're looking for that blueprint, I'll put a link in the description below to my seven level guitar system. Like I said, I specialize in working with absolute beginners, especially older adults. And the goal is to each level is just give you a few things to work on, help you get some wins, and then you move on to the next level. And then you get a few more things and the next level, and each level builds upon itself, all right? So it gets slightly, progressively harder as you go. I've had so many students who've done this course, and they come out on the other end and they're like, I am so much better. I never thought I was going to be able to do this. And you actually made it possible. I was floundering on YouTube for years or learning on my own for, like, 20 years, and I did that. I learned on my own for 10 years and didn't get very far myself. And they're like, you know, just having that structure was so helpful. So if you're looking for more structure, go check out the seven level guitar system and try and implement some of these things in your practice routine starting today.