How to Practice the Guitar Effectively

By: Peter Lenkefi

Learning how to practice the guitar effectively can help you transcend from guitar enthusiast to musician. The old saying that "practice makes perfect" is a bit overused, but it doesn't oversimplify the importance of making regular guitar practice a part of your road map to becoming better at playing the guitar. What does learning how to practice the guitar effectively involve? Essentially, effective guitar practice consists of taking four elements of playing the guitar and incorporating them into your practice routine. When you make preparation, timing, and warming up a part of your routine of how to practice the guitar effectively, you will see how quickly you improve your skills.

Timing

Timing is important to learning how to practice the guitar effectively because it will mentally your prepare you. We all have a biological clock (yes men too!) that functions basically according to how we perform out activities. This is how people are able to adapt to shifting work shifts and other such changes in time rhythm. While you don't have to practice the same time, it is a good idea to try and set aside a time each day to practice the guitar. It may seem awkward at first, but eventually your body will adjust to the new activity and eventually it will seem like second nature.

In addition to finding a place in your schedule to practice the guitar, it is a good idea to practice for a specific amount of time each time you practice. While you can obtain some good practice time within 15 minutes, a 30-minute session is better for when you want to learn how to practice the guitar effectively.

Preparation

So what will you do when you practice? Knowing the answer to this question is essential to understanding how to practice the guitar effectively. It is not enough to show up at your scheduled time with your guitar in your lap. You should prepare what you intend to practice before your practice session. By doing this you don't waste time. Is there a particular song you're learning? Do you want to practice a new chord you recently learned? Not that you need it, but thinking ahead about what you are going to practice is a great motivator.

If getting in the habit of performing guitar maintenance seems like a chore, make it part of your routine that you perform before you practice. You don't have to spend twenty minutes of your practice session cleaning your guitar, but a few swipes of the body, fretboard, and strings with a dust cloth is a good place to start. It is also a good idea to perform regular maintenance after you finish your practice session. Incorporating these maintenance steps into your practice session is not only part of how to practice the guitar effectively, but it also a way to add life to your guitar.

Warming Up

Before you actually start practicing the guitar, you should warm up first. How you choose to warm up is ultimately up to you. Some people play scales, either the chromatic or whole scale since this is the best way to warm up all of your fingers. This part of your practice session should not be stressful. The goal is to work up to playing the guitar.

After you have gone through these basic steps you can start practicing the guitar.

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Learn to Play Guitar

Getting Started To Play Guitar - A Beginner Lesson by Henre Lobus

The Dilemma

If you are just beginning to learn playing the guitar, you are bombarded with many guitar lessons especially nowadays where so much are available online. This becomes a dilemma for those starting out to play the guitar. They just do not know where to start!

How to Start?

When I began to play the guitar during my elementary years I did not start to learn forming chords rightaway. Not even the easiest ones. The simple reasons of having short fingers those times had me tinkling only the strings note for note. The melody of "Happy Birthday" song was the first one I ever played on. I started to learn open chords like D,A,G as soon as I was able to reach the fretboard with my fingers.

Moving forward

Having a guitar chord chart will fast track the process of learning chords. Just start with the open chords C,A,G,E,D and move on to study barre chords like F,Bb,Eb and more. Barre chords need your index finger to hold the strings down across the fretboard. This is the reason why these chords are a little difficult to learn.

When you buy a song book, choose among the ones with accompanying guitar chord chart. Practice a lot of songs with open chords then move further to more complex ones. The song entitled "Horse With No Name" by America is a good start cause it is played with only two chords. Remember, the ingredient to success in playing guitar is perseverance and patience. Most of the guitar teachers will tell you the same words.

Essentially, you should learn how to read guitar tabs. It's a musical notation meant to help guitar players in transcribing any song. Hence, as a beginner you should also learn how to strum a guitar. Moreover, it pays to watch how other guitar players form chords. Luckily, this is much available online.

Conclusion

The accessibility of lessons through internet makes it easier to aspiring guitar players to learn fast unlike the older days where you need to watch a gig just to learn fundamentals and some techniques. The vast majority of lessons are confusing to beginners. Fortunately, what I told you worked for me and there's no reason why it won't work for you as well.

About the Author

Henre Lobus has been playing guitar for over 15 years. He now writes articles for GuitarReference.com a source of free guitar lessons online

Learn to Play Guitar Free

Hi,

Welcome to my new blog giving hints and tips on how to learn to play guitar free.

Very soon I will be posting articles and links to help with your guitar learning so please check back.

Thanks,

Paul.