Only Got 15 Min? No Problem! Guitar Practice Tips

Most students think you need an hour to practice to be effective. But what if I told you with just 15 minutes practicing very specific things, you can actually make more progress on your guitar than if you just spent an hour playing your guitar? And that is a big difference. Practicing your guitar versus playing. I know many students who will play their guitar for an hour, but they really only practice for maybe five, five or 10 minutes. The reason is, you know, we start practicing things, and we start with some of those challenging things. We realize they're challenging, and then we want to do something fun, and we practice songs, and we play along to songs, and that's great because that's the fun part of why we're doing all this practice. I want you to play songs, but the first part of your practice routine should be very specific. And if you're someone who's busy, like me, you. You may only have 10 or 15 minutes to practice, and that's perfectly fine. What I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you what to do when you only have 15 minutes to practice to make sure you're making progress every week and reaching your goals.

So I call this the perfect practice routine. And it's something that I share with my students in my seven level system. And. And what we're going to do is we're going to break our practice down into the three fundamentals of learning guitar. Okay. I teach the three fundamentals for playing songs. All right, Number one, we got to get our fingers moving. We need to work on finger dexterity, because if we don't have good finger dexterity, we can't change fast enough between our chords. All right? And our hands are slow. And then that brings us to number two, which is the chords themselves. We need to be learning chords, practicing them, but practicing them in a very specific way that helps us learn how to play songs. And then finally, we're going to work on strumming, rhythm and timing. I'm going to show you a tool that I recommend my students use to make sure they're really getting good timing. Let's talk about our warmup. All right? Our first five minutes, we're going to spend using some kind of dexterity exercise, and I'm going to make a recommendation to you. Most people have one of these. It's a phone, and usually there's some sort of clock or something, stopwatch app. If you don't, you can just use a clock in your house. But something I find with a lot of students, when they do a finger Exercise like this is they think they're practicing it for longer than they are. Let me show you. So what happens is most people take a traditional spider exercise, so I'll use this one. I'm not going to explain the spider exercise, but if you want to grab my free crash course, I'll put a link in the description below that has this exercise. So. So it's a spider exercise and it's just a finger dexterity exercise to warm up with to get your fingers moving. Especially if you're an older learner that has arthritis, warming up your fingers is key. Okay. If you are someone that has arthritis before you even do this, I would just take 30 seconds of your practice time doing this. Kind of just opening and closing your hands. 1. It starts getting the tendons to loosen up and we're starting to get some blood into the fingers. And I would do it with both hands. Okay. Even though I know you're using one hand for your fretting hand, do it with both hands. Do that for like 30 seconds. It'll just start getting some of the blood flow into the fingers and then you start practicing this exercise. So you saw exactly what I did. I kind of went down this spider exercise. Okay. And I'm going a little bit faster than most people probably are when they start. Okay. And you do it and you're like, great, maybe I'll do it a second time. And you go all the way back down and then you come back up and you're like, great. Okay, I practiced my fire exercise. Let me move on. How, how long did that take me? I don't know. You have to watch the timestamps, but I'm guessing it was probably only 10 or 20 seconds, right? That was in five minutes. So that's the misunderstanding a lot of students have when they practice is how long they should actually practice something. Now what did I say? Five minutes. Okay, so I'm not going to practice for five minutes. I'm going to set a timer for one minute. Just so you see how long one minute is. Alright, So I set my phone for one minute. I'm going to push play. I'm going to go very slow with this spider exercise and I'm going to talk through it so that we just don't want me practicing for a minute. All right? So I'm going to push play. And what I would focus on, you don't have to go fast. When you're practicing these finger exercises, the most important thing is to keep it relaxed. Okay. Make sure you're breathing I have a lot of students who play through the spider exercise and they go.

And then by the time they get to the bottom, they go and a big puff of air comes out. Alright, so if you do not breathe while you're practicing this, you'll get tension. Okay, so I'm just going nice and slow. I'm making sure that all my notes are sounding nice. Okay. I'm not working on speed here. Just going nice and slow, making sure I'm relaxed, playing through. We're still not a minute in. Okay. I've gotten very slowly, so I'm just going to start repeating that process again. Okay. Maybe the first couple times I play through nice and slow and the next couple times I'm gonna pick up the speed. Maybe my playing gets a little bit sloppy because I'm trying to go faster. Right. Because our goal is we do want these fingers. There you go. That's a minute. Alright, so going at that speed, I only went through about one and a half times. If I was playing faster, I could probably go through it a little bit faster. Did it. I know I was talking through the minute, but did it. See, like a long time it is when you actually time yourself. Now that was just one minute. I want you to do it five times as long. We're going to do five minutes. So in one minute, I went through this one and a half times. If I did that five times through, you're probably going to go up and down maybe seven or eight times. Okay. If you did it at that speed, that's a lot more than just going up and down a couple times. All right. And again, you heard me talking through the process. I'm working on very specific things here. Working on relaxing. Okay. Speed comes from relaxation. Okay. So if you're someone who's just starting this type of exercise and you see your fingers flying off like that. Slow it down. Go nice and slow, breathe through it and don't put the next finger down until your hand relaxes. Okay. And this is might be how slow you need to go and that's okay. And maybe if you go that slow, you only get through it a couple times. That's perfectly fine. But your practice is focusing on something specific. You're focusing on relaxation. Okay. Then maybe you switch your focus to making sure all the notes sound good. So maybe you're playing relaxed, but you're, you're getting this, you know, and that's okay. You don't want to focus on fixing too many things at once. So if you're going to do it the first time through, I'm going to work on relaxing. Maybe the second time through, okay. I'm not going to focus so much on relaxing. I'm going to try and stay relaxed, but I'm going to try and make sure that all my notes sound good. Okay, Maybe you get the first three. Good. And then you put that pinky down and it does this. Don't go back, fix it, make it sound good and then keep working. Okay, so there's five minutes of very specific practice. You're working on a finger dexterity exercise. We're trying to relax the hand because like I said, speed comes from relaxation and experience. Which is why I want to do it five for five minutes. But I want you to get enough reps in that you can start building some muscle memory into this exercise. Once those five minutes are done, the timer goes off, you move on to your next five minute session. So now I got five minutes to work on chords. And maybe you're someone that's in my seven level system. And you've learned the easy chords. All right, we've learned E minor, we've learned C, we learned E minor in G. Okay. And the goal is to start working on speed, getting between these chords so much faster. Okay, so what I would do, I've got a few chord changes here. I've got E minor to C, I've got E minor to G, and then I've got G to C. Okay? So I've got three different chord changes. I only got five minutes to practice. So what I would do in this session is I would pick two chords. I'd probably pick E minor in C, E minor in G. And then I'm going to make a note of that on my practice session because I want to make sure the next time I go through that, I start with G and C. And what I want you to do, I want you to practice these chord changes for two and a half minutes. Okay? That's going to seem like a long time, but here's actually a suggestion I'll make for you. I'll give you practice. Two minutes going E minor to C. And then two minutes, E minor to G. And then at the very end, that last minute, I want you to go E minor to C, E minor to G to E minor to C to E. Now you're practicing all three of the chords together. So that's a great way to break up five minutes. So we're doing E minor to G, E minor, C. And then that last minute, you're kind of combining them together. So you get five good minutes. And notice I'm not practicing a ton of chords. Keeping it simple, just working on a couple chord pairs. I got three. Three chords. And then eventually we'll add in the easy D chord into the mix as well. And again, just pick a couple pairs and then practice working through them. Then you get to the next practice session. If you have the D chord in the mix, maybe you're going to practice D to E minor and D to G. So you mix up your practice sessions so that you're hitting these chords and getting them to go faster. Again, there's two ways to practice chords in these sessions. You choose which way you're going to do it. So there's slow, comfortable, and clean. So we can go nice and slow and make sure our hand is relaxed. Okay. Again, we're working on relaxing the hand. That's one way to do it. The other way is to go as fast as we can and the chords might fall apart a little bit, meaning we might get some muting. You might start hearing this when you're strumming. That is okay. Okay. Especially if you're a beginner, practice does not make perfect. Practice makes progress. You are a beginner. I promise you, nothing is going to be perfect in the beginning. Now, I do want you to practice the chords correctly. Meaning if you play an E minor chord and your fingers are like this, don't strum, because that's not the E minor chord. I want you to play the right chord. But understand that that as you try to get faster, you have to sacrifice something to do that. So usually when we try to push ourselves to go faster, we have to sacrifice the clarity of the chords. And that's totally fine, totally normal. Especially if you're a beginner, it can take three to six, sometimes even nine months for those chords to start sounding good. There's so many things mechanically you need to work on. So understand, especially for beginners, practice does not make perfect. Practice makes progress. So you're either going to practice nice and slow for relaxation, or you're going to practice really fast to try and push that speed so that your chord changes can get faster and faster and faster. And understand that by doing that, it might make the chords sound a little bit clunky at times. But understand, you can always slow things down again. And eventually clean and fast, they're going to meet together somewhere in the middle, and eventually you'll be able to play chords fast and clean. Now, before I get into the final part of your session, which is going to Be your timing and your rhythm. I want to introduce a tool that I find is an absolute must have for my students. It is an app called Metronome Beats. You can get it on Android, you can get it on an iPhone, and all it is is it's a click track.

And when you would sit down to practice, you would write down your starting point. So for a lot of students when they start practicing the guitar, their chord changes are maybe only 20 beats per minute, 30 beats per minute and they work their way up. So I have this set to 60 beats per minute, which is one second on a clock. Okay. And when you click, you hear that click coming through, you would change chords on the click. So if you're working on speed, and this will also help you with timing, we going to change chords on that click. So if I use the E minor to C, it would sound like this. Ready? And.

Okay. So I would do this for two minutes straight and that's going to seem like a very long time, but it is so worth it. That's what you have to do. It's not 30 seconds, it's two minutes. Okay, that right there was probably about 30 seconds or so. Probably not even 30 seconds. You guys can check the timestamp on it. Maybe Mark will put it up on the screen here, my editor. But it's not as long as you think it is. And that's why I say you have to time it. And then you're like, great. 60 feels really comfortable. I feel good. Now I'm going to bump it up to 65 and it's the same process again. Okay, now I'm at 65. 1, 2, 3, 4, 4.

Okay, back to that one strum per click and you're like, great, that feels great. Now I'm going to bump it up to 72. Ready? A.m.

Okay, you're like, oh, this also feels great. Awesome. I'm making a lot of progress here. And then you go up to 75 and all of a sudden it sounds like.

So what you've now done is you have figured out your maximum possible speed before it falls apart. Alright, so at 70 you're still doing okay. It's coming out clean and sounding good. But when you get to 75, it starts falling apart. So you're going to write down 70 to 75. That's your speed range right now for these chords. And the goal is to keep pushing this week to week. And this is very important because you can see there's a number. So when you write this number down and you see that going up week to week to week, you're going to start feeling motivated because you're going to see your progress. A lot of students, they get frustrated because they're like, I don't know if I'm getting any better. If you use that metronome and you write that number down, you're going to see that you're getting better. And that's super motivating. So how can we use this metronome to help us with strumming? I told you I was going to teach you how to work on your timing. And, and that's our last session. Our last session is strumming. Now, in my seven level system, I give you different levels have different strumming patterns. But right now what we're going to do to keep things similar, we're just going to use what I call a quarter note strumming pattern. It's going to be four down strums per chord. Okay. Right now we're going to start by just working on the strumming pattern. So we're not going to switch chords. All right. And we'll start with that E minor chord. So I put it back to 60 beats per minute. Okay. Nice and slow. Or we'll do 70 since that's where you were at. Okay. So we were at 70 beats per minute. Comfortable. This is what we're going to do. So I'm going to take E minor and I'm just going to sit and make sure I get the strumming pattern first. So it's going to be E minor. One, two, three, four. We've got one, two, three, four. 1, 2, 3, 4. Okay. And I'm just going to sit here with this metronome clicking in the background. And I'm going to do that maybe for one or two minutes. If you feel really comfortable with the strumming pattern, probably a minute is going to be fine. Okay. And you're going to practice that for a minute and you're like, great, that feels good. So now what we're going to do, we're going to change between chords. Okay. Remember earlier I gave you that E minor C, E minor G, got a little chord progression, so it's almost like playing a song now. Okay, so we're going to do that. We're going to take the strumming pattern and now we're going to put a chord progression over it. I'm going to use my click track. Every four clicks I'm going to switch a chord. OK. So 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. To C 1, 2, 3, back to E minor, 1, 2, 3, 4, back to G.

E minor.

To C.

2, E minor.

Back to G.

So C. You can use chords and chord progressions with your strumming patterns to already have it start sounding a little bit more musical. That's the unfortunate thing with a click track is it is very robotic. It's very mechanical. I know some students who prefer to play along with a drum track. And you can do that too. You can look up drum tracks on YouTube. You know, you can put drum track 60 beats per minute, or you can find a country drum track 70 beats per minute, and you can play along with that. Some students find it easier to play along with something that's musical. Drums versus just a click on a metronome. But you can see how this tool helps you really line up your top. When you go into a recording studio, which I've done many times, a lot of times as the musician, what I would do is I would play to a click track because you want your recording to be consistent. Now, when you play music live, it can sometimes go faster, slower, whatever. But when you're recording a song, you want to try and keep it at a level speed. So we play along to a click track. So it's a very important skill, not spill skill to get. Because I have a click track in my ear, I'm playing my song and. And then all my other band members now play over this track that I've recorded, which we will then rerecord in the final product. So if you guys are looking for a very good strumming routine to practice along to, go check out my strumming workout right over there where you can practice along with me and work on your strumming and your timing.