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How to make guitar practice fun again

Angela Manning Education , , , , ,
How to make guitar practice fun again

It starts out fun, but over time guitar practice can become anything but. In other words, boredom kicks in and before you know it, you’re dreading those practice sessions that you may have once given up anything for.

Of course, it’s hard to identify just why you’ve lost the fun-factor from these sessions without looking at your individual schedule. However, there are some common mistakes, and we’ll now take a look at some of the best ways to finally bring back the enjoyment-factor to these practice sessions.

The key to a fun session is trackable progress

In the words of Tom Hess, tracking progress is absolutely paramount to keeping spirits up during practice. This should hardly come as a surprise, after all, if your guitar practice doesn’t have any end goal – just why are you there in the first place?

Therefore, before each and every practice session set a goal. Better yet, if you stick to long-term goals, it can give you a sense of eagerness prior to each session.

The best practice sessions, or the most fun in the case of this guide, are performed by those people who really take their goal tracking seriously. As well as carrying out all of the above, if you can note down each and every goal on paper it just aids the tracking process, and this should correlate with your enjoyment levels as well.

It’s not all about playing – listening is key as well

As this page is dedicated to guitar practice sessions, this next suggestion might raise a few eyebrows. However, most professional teachers will insist that you give some of your time into listening to guitar-based music that you enjoy. By doing this, you can immediately spark inspiration – and then carry this out into a practice session.

The concept behind this is that you will be reminded just why you want to play guitar. In some ways, it’s a form of motivation, and if you can be motivated prior to your practice session there’s every chance that you will just enjoy it a lot more.

Learning is fun

Sometimes, we forget the reasons why we engage in practice sessions. A lot of amateur guitar players will proceed to practice the same thing over and over again – without learning anything new. Suffice to say, this approach isn’t going to do you any good whatsoever and over time boredom will kick in.

Therefore, you need to insist that each session you engage in is going to promote a new skill. It might be small, but that doesn’t matter – the point is that you are going to benefit at least in some way from it.

The new skill might be from your teacher, from an online resource or even a friend – but the main thing is to keep your sessions fresh. Some people might find that these new skills come in just once a week – it will vary from player to player.

Why a Good Guitarist Must Learn about the Theories of Music

Angela Manning Education , , , , ,
Why a Good Guitarist Must Learn about the Theories of Music

If you play the guitar, you may feel as if you’re learning to play the instrument over and over again each time you want to master a new song. Or, if you feel comfortable, you can’t play a song unless the tab is right there for you to read from. Or maybe you feel you’re a good player, but you’re incapable of writing your own stuff or even improvising. If this is the case, then what you have missed is music theory. This is exactly why any good guitarist should consider taking music theory classes online.

Why Music Theory Matters

If you want to learn how to play an instrument, but you don’t want to learn about the theory, you will fail. Similarly, you can’t learn a new language without learning at least something about its grammar. Sure, you may be able to make yourself understandable, but you will never come across as a native. This is the same with an instrument. No, you don’t have to be able to explain the theory behind the Phrygian-Dominant scale. In fact, you don’t even have to know how to play it. But if you don’t even know what a scale is, then it is unlikely that you will ever be a good guitar player.

What Is Music Theory?

Music theory is about understanding what music’s most common patterns are, where they have come from, and why they sound good. All music is, is a pattern. Pick any song, for instance, and you will see that it can be reduced to just three chords on any guitar. That is a pattern that any good musician needs to know about, not in the least because it will mean that if you see the opening chord of a new song, you will instantly know which other two chords you will have to play.

Naturally, you can play the guitar, even quite well, by simply practicing the same song over and over again until you have memorized it forever. However, this is a battle you will then have to go through with every new song you learn. The theory of music is the language of music. If someone were to say something in Chinese to you, with the right amount of practice and patients, you will be able to repeat it and sound as if you are Chinese yourself. But you will never know what it means, unless you learn about that.

You should see music as a form of language, because it is. It is designed to make us feel certain things and certain ways, which is what language has been designed to do. And if you want to learn how to understand or speak a language, then you have to immerse yourself in it. That doesn’t mean going into the etymology of the last 10,000 years, but it is about understanding the key developments at each historically significant point. And the exact same is true for music as well.