5 More Quick Tips to Get Better Faster

This article offers five more quick and easy tips to help you improve rhythm guitar and general guitar playing faster. As in the previous article about five quick tips, there are no new fundamental skills to learn that take hours of your time. These tips are easy to do and implement! 

Tip #1

Create a plan. You want to have something planned before you sit down with your guitar to practice. It could be as simple as just thinking through what goals you want to accomplish during that practice session with your guitar. It isn't necessary to plan out the whole week, though do so if you like. Your practice time will be more efficient and productive if you have a plan to follow. 

Tip#2

Take mini breaks. Practice sessions should be broken up into shorter focused sessions with a break. Concentrating for long periods of time will start to tire your brain. A tired brain affects your fingers, and more mistakes will occur. Ideally, you should have more correct repetitions of something you are trying to learn than incorrect ones. It is a matter of balancing the scale to practice to the point of being more correct than less. Upon finding that you are incorrect more often, take a little break. The break can be a minute or two, perhaps switching to something else on the guitar for that time. Then, return to what you were initially working on. If that doesn't help, slow down what you are practicing so you can get more correct repetitions.

Tip#3

Practice the hard stuff first. The hard stuff is the thing(s) that you can't presently do well or struggle with. Get it out of the way first. As the practice session proceeds, make the things you practice easier. By the end of your session, you should be practicing the easiest things to do. Getting the hard stuff out of the way at the beginning is when you are at your peak mental efficiency. You will improve more on this challenging part than waiting until the end. 

Tip#4

Be aware of the tension in your picking hand. Be conscious about how tight you are holding your pick. When holding too tight, you're going to tighten up muscles in your whole arm just by squeezing these two fingers! This restricts motion when you need as much flexibility with your picking hand for rhythm guitar as possible. Simply not squeezing your pick too hard may instantaneously improve your playing! 

Tip#5

Practice left hand and right hands independently. For example, you may want to work on a simple strumming pattern and chord changes. First, learn what your strumming hand is supposed to be doing in isolation without the chords. Once proficient at the strumming, then you can address changing the chords. Practice changing chords without any strumming. Move your fingers into the chord shapes deliberately and as perfectly as possible. Once the chord changes are down, combine the strumming and chord hands to see how it sounds. It won't be perfect right away. However, you will improve at what you're trying to achieve faster than practicing in a mediocre way 1000 times and hoping it will improve. 

Bonus tip! Have fun at the end. This tip was #5 in the previous article. You always want to have fun at the end of any session. Practice things you can do well and walk away feeling good about your guitar playing. You are more likely to want to pick up the guitar tomorrow. The more you pick it up, the more you improve

Remember to always have fun with your guitar and I’ll see you next time…

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About Mark Turko: Mark Turko is a professional guitar player and instructor with over 30 years of experience and teaches guitar lessons online.