TOP Practice MISTAKE Keeping Your From Success

Now, you've probably heard the phrase, practice makes perfect. But what if being a perfectionist is holding you back from making progress on your guitar? I'm going to show you why right now.

Now, obviously, when we're practicing, we don't want to intentionally practice things wrong. Because your brain, if you practice things the wrong way, your brain doesn't know the difference between right and wrong. So if you keep training your brain that this is a C chord, when it's really a D chord, well, that's what it's going to be. Now, I don't want to knock perfect. You know, this. This really comes up mostly for a lot of students when they're trying to learn chords, because this happens. You know, you're strumming a chord and you hear this string muting, and it's super annoying. It's really annoying. But I want to tell you, it will take months, sometimes even a full year for some students to really clear up their chord changes. If you're just getting started right, you're only three or six months into your journey. You still might have some muting going on. It's totally normal. It's. It will come with time. In the beginning, you are learning the mechanics. This is a brand new skill for a lot of you. Your hands don't work the way you would hope they would, and you're trying to learn some new mechanics. I always tell students in the beginning it's all about mechanics. But if you're trying to be a perfectionist with everything you practice is actually slowing you down, especially in this chord change arena, or if you're trying to learn a solo and get it up to speed. So this is what happens with students. They'll practice chords and they won't play any faster than what sounds good, right? Okay. Because you're a perfectionist and you want it to sound good. Because if you go faster, this is what happens.

You're like, well, that sounds like shit. I'm not. I'm just going to stay slow because it sounds better when I play slow. And you never get yourself out of your comfort zone. This is where practicing imperfectly can help you. Because this is a little formula, okay? A little principle. In order to go faster, to do something faster, you have to get out of your comfort zone. You have to make mistakes, and it has to sound a little bit crappy. Okay? A race car driver, if they want to learn how to take a turn at 130 miles an hour, they're not going to do it at 90 just because they can do it at 90. No, they're going to do it at 130 miles per hour. They're going to try and really push themselves out of their comfort zone. They have to do it. Same with you. How can you do that? Let me show you. Right now. Enter this little tool here. Not my phone. It's actually called a metronome. I use an app called Metronome Beats. And all it is, it's like a heartbeat.

It's just a click. And usually what I tell students to do is every time you hear a click, I want you to switch chords. So let's try a common chord change that people hate. G and C.

Okay? So that would be 60 beats to rin it. Every time it clicks, you switch chords. Okay? If you hate the C and G chord change, let me know in the comments below, because you're not alone. And I want people to see that there's lots of people that hate the C and G chord change. So that's 60 beats per minute. For me, it's very slow, but for some students, this tends to be a plateau point. They're doing really good. And I tell my students the gold standard is to try and get to 100 beats per minute. If you're a little bit older, you know, the 60 to 80 range is pretty good to start. But students are like, I can't get this chord change above 60 beats per minute. No matter how many times I practice, I'm just going back and forth. This is driving me nuts. What am I doing? And I said, well, are you practicing at 70? And they're like, why would I practice it at 70? I can't even do it at 60. And we need to change the psychology of your brain because your brain wants this perfection. And when you're going for speed, perfection is your enemy. You will not get faster trying to do things perfectly. You're just not. You're not. You have to go faster. So if you speed this up to 70 and it sounds like this.

And you're like, that sounds like crap. I'm like, perfect. That was great. And you're like, how is that perfect? Sounded like this. And that's not the point. That's not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to go as fast as you can, get those fingers moving as fast as you can. All I care about as a guitar teacher is that if you're making a C chord, that your fingers look like that. As long as your fingers get on the right string and the right fret. If it sounds like this to me, it's perfect. Okay. Same with the G chord. If you're switching back to the G chord, the open strings might ring. If the other ones are muted, I don't care. As long you know, whichever way you make your G chord is fine. I do it this way, whichever way. If it sounds like this, but you are going faster and getting your fingers on the right strings, to me, that's perfect. That's awesome. And it's perfect for that exercise. Okay, so this is a concept you guys need to understand. In order to go faster on the guitar, you have to sacrifice perfection. It has to be imperfect, because think about it. Think about writing a letter. Okay, you write a letter, and you start off, and you're going nice and slow, and everything looks great and legible. And then like, oh, shoot, I have a meeting in, like, five minutes. And then you start writing really fast, and it gets, like, really pretty much you can't read it. So it's the same thing with the guitar. And in order to go faster, you have to get a little bit of that imperfection, because this is what's going to happen when you do that. You take the time to go slow. I'm not saying going slow is a bad thing, and being perfect is a bad thing. When you're practicing for clarity, go slow. Okay. This way, if you hear a muted string. What am I doing? Oh, I can fix it. I can make it ring through. Okay. When you're practicing for perfection, go slow. But when you were practicing for speed and trying to get faster on the guitar, you have to let go of perfection. You have to sacrifice the clarity a little bit to push yourself out of your comfort zone. Just like that race car driver. Now, speaking of perfection, the wrist is really, really important in guitar. And if you're having a lot of wrist pain because you do not have the right posture, go watch this video over here. I'm going to show you how to solve the most common wrist pain issues on the guitar.