Slow playing is one of the best guitar tricks at your disposal. It allows you to play with greater accuracy, comfort, and musicality right away. The idea is to build a strong playing foundation through slow practice, then speed up whenever you’re ready.

You’ll find that once you assimilate the right motions, speeding up comes naturally. You won’t need to force it.

In a certain sense, your brain is “dumb” when it comes to learning guitar. Instead of learning what you’re trying to do (which is usually to play beautiful music), it learns what you actually do. Thus, it retains the wrong motions just as surely as the right ones.

Programmers in particular will understand this concept, since they’ve likely been frustrated by computers that follow the letter of their coding rather than its intention. When it comes to learning, our brains have similar limitations.

Slow playing is powerful because it allows to “program” near-perfect guitar playing. Most of the time you should be practicing so slowly that it feels like you’re playing in slow motion. You might even pretend you’re “trapped” in slow motion if that helps you get into the habit.

For another take on slow practice I recommend this interesting article.

I often draw comparisons between honing guitar skills and working out. What is usually called “technical practice” is the process of training your playing mechanism, and often independently of the pieces you’re learning.

For instance, if you have trouble with barre chords, you’re going to struggle with them whenever they come up regardless of musical considerations. As a result, you should drill barre chords in the practice room until they’re relatively easy. That way, whenever you encounter them in songs you’re learning, they won’t deter you at all. They’ll be a non-issue.

Of course, barre chords are just one example. You basically need to figure out which techniques you most struggle with and come up with exercises that target them. Embrace some gym logic: if your chest is weak, you should do push-ups, and if your legs look small, you should do squats.

Be sure to master the fundamentals. All too often players think they can pluck a string or hammer-on well enough, but the quality of their execution is lacking. Just because you can “do” something—such as a simple thumb stroke in fingerstyle—doesn’t mean you’re good enough at it. There are infinite gradations in quality, so your work is never done.

Simply put, stay with the fundamentals longer than you think you need to. Try to restrain yourself from always moving on to the next thing before you’re ready. One technique done well is worth so much more than sixty done poorly.

Bruce Lee says it well: “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

You’ve got problems, I’ve got problems—we’ve all got problems. But when it comes to guitar, your best move is to isolate each problem until you solve it.

What constitutes a problem? Normally, it’s any spot where your sound is suffering as a result of a technical issue. It can also be a spot that feels hard, even if you’re getting the right sound. You haven’t really gotten a song down until everything feels easy. Chord changes are a great example, and often create such problems.

Let’s say you’re strumming along to a G-C-D chord progression. Let’s also say you’re really good at switching from G-C and C-D but you’re a bit slower going from D-G.

The mistake many guitarists make is to play through the entire song over and over, hoping against hope that D-G will feel easier eventually, instead of just isolating and drilling the D-G change.

Isolating problems can be really powerful. You’ll probably be surprised at how quickly you can solve problems if you just focus on them. Your brain is amazing at problem solving, but if spread your attention too thin (practice the whole piece instead of the core issue) you’re looking at too many problems for any one to be effectively addressed.

One great trick I have for you is to mark every little difficulty in the score and work through them one by one. Be sure to humble yourself.

Even if you’ve been playing the G chord for ten years, if it feels even slightly hard or awkward, it won’t hurt you to work on it some. Your goal is to play everything you want to play easily, and that’s only possible if you work intelligently.

This one is simple yet surprisingly effective. In fact, it’s basically a guitar hack. If you’re looking to improve, the best thing you can do is keep your guitar within arm’s reach in your favorite room in the house. OK, maybe not your favorite room per se, but the one you spend your free time in. It could be your bedroom, living room, or basement.

If you keep your guitar locked away in a closet, then you’ll only have it with you during scheduled practice sessions. Keep it handy, however, and you’ll find yourself reaching for it just to pass the time. You’ll naturally do more “mini-practices,” which might only last a few minutes but really add up over the course of a day.

Keeping your guitar accessible and visible will usually lead to a greater frequency of playing. And as I’ve tried to hammer home throughout this blog, a greater frequency of playing leads to fluency more surely than a lump sum of hours. You want your guitar to feel familiar, comfortable, even homey in your hands. I mean, what’s virtuosity if not a kind of human oneness with an instrument?

Sometimes we need to make compromises, but I think guitar players sometimes compromise too much too quickly.

The way I see it, any time you’re trying to narrow your guitar world, you’re compromising something. Let’s say you really admire both metal and flamenco as guitar styles. You get into metal first, spending a lot of time developing your skills and exploring the music.

However, in the process of focusing on metal, you end up putting your flamenco dreams on stand-by. The more time you sink into metal guitar, the more your dream of also playing flamenco feels unrealistic. Everything about it now looks really unfamiliar and intimidating. If you’re like a lot of people, you’ll start to tell yourself that you’re a metal guitarist rather than a flamenco one, and that’s all there is to it.

Which might be totally fine. We can’t play every style, of course. Yet at the same time I think there was probably no real reason to sacrifice flamenco in the above case. If you practice efficiently, I don’t see why you can’t play multiple styles of guitar pretty well.

The main point is to really question yourself whenever you’re giving something up. Avoid being quick to form narratives like, “My ears aren’t good, so I’ll focus on reading,” or, “I’m good at playing by ear, so I don’t need to learn theory.” You can be good at a lot of different things, and many skills that seem redundant often complement each other in ways that aren’t clear at first.

Some people seem to memorize easily while others really struggle with it. If you find that memorization doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t worry! You can develop your memory just like any other skill.

The key is to memorize a little bit every day. If you do this for a little while you’ll find your memory becoming increasingly reliable. Plus, you’ll also discover, through trying to memorize stuff all the time, some of the best strategies that work for your brain.

One of the best ways to memorize music is to use “chunking.” As the name suggests, you want to break up your music into small chunks, memorizing one of them at a time. Eventually you link all the chunks together and boom, you’ve accomplished an impressive mental feat!

If you’re the type of person for whom memory comes naturally, you might still want to enhance your memory. Unless you’re already a regular performer, you might find that a piece of music that seemed memorized in the practice room feels less familiar on stage. The best way to avoid this is to do more memory work than you feel you need to when you’re preparing a piece of music.

Lastly, I want to make note of an easy and underrated way to practice your repertoire, including pure memory work: read through your score and study the ins and outs of it away from the guitar. Done regularly, this practice can really solidify the pieces in your mind, further insulating you against memory slips or uncertainties in performance.

The idea of natural talent in music goes like this, roughly speaking: some folks have an ear for music, some do not. Some folks who take up certain instruments appear to learn quickly, while others do not.

If you’re one of the lucky ones, you might consider being a musician. If you’re not, you’re basically wasting your time as you’ll never be any good. Sound familiar?

The above is wrongheaded for many reasons. For one, it’s not true that your “natural” ear determines your musical potential. I mean, there are many ways to be a musician and thus many types of “ears” one can have. Plus, anyone who does ear training knows that a musical ear isn’t so much a birthright, but a product of hard work.

Likewise, instrumental development has almost everything to do with material circumstances surrounding an artist. Would Chopin have been the same musical genius if he had to work in a factory 16 hours a day? Of course not.

You can allow for natural proclivities and good genes and such, but what we do with our time has infinitely more bearing on our musicianship than anything purely “natural.” How many Chopins are born to neglect, turmoil, and tragedy? The answer is, virtually all of them. For every single artist who reaches maturity, there are millions with equal talent fallen by the wayside. The names we ought to remember far outnumber the ones we do

So we’re in a good news, bad news situation. The bad news is that we can’t really use our lack of natural talent as an excuse for avoiding hard work. But the good news is that basically anyone can become an excellent musician with the right training. If you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet you have all sorts of untapped potential as a guitarist.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the idea of natural talent is that it causes many musicians to quit prematurely. Once people get the sense that they don’t have “talent” they often give up. This makes sense in a world where natural talent is all-important, but that’s simply not the reality we live in.

I’ll end with Chopin’s take on the subject, which he repeated to all his students: “The talent is the passion.”

So if you really love music, stop telling yourself you’re not talented enough! You just need to channel that passion into progress with thoughtful and frequent practice.

We tend to gravitate toward one (or certainly one dominant) way of thinking about things. Yet it’s often more useful to accumulate and embrace numerous perspectives, even if some of them seem to be in opposition. This creates a conceptual rainbow whose whole far exceeds the value of its parts.

But in order to tease out this rainbow, we need to do an unusual and challenging kind of work I think of as mental stretching.

To help illustrate this point, let’s say you’re practicing a big shift across the fretboard. After working on it for a while without much progress, you begin to see the shift as a huge obstacle. You almost get to the point where the entire piece of music feels defined by the shift itself. Maybe you begin to have trouble practicing the piece because that would mean practicing the dreaded shift.

Here is where mental stretching may come in handy. Without intending to do so, you’ve trained your mind to fear the shift. The key to undoing that is basically a two-step process:
 

1) Brainstorm new mental frameworks

This is an essentially creative process where you ask yourself, “How else could I think of and/or experience this shift?” One helpful framework in this case is to imagine mastering the shift. Try to really imagine how effortless it could feel with enough practice; imagine fast-forwarding your guitar practicing to a point where the shift as a complete non-issue.
 

2) Embrace one or more of the new frameworks

This is where you work to accept other ways of thinking with the same intensity of belief as the ways of thinking that arose naturally.

You now should have the tools to de-stigmatize the shift you’re working on. One way to use mental stretching here is to alternate between viewing the shift as difficult and viewing it as easy. Saying these things to yourself isn’t enough—you should aspire to actually believe them one at a time.

Done well, this sort of work is mentally exhausting. However, it’s a fantastic way to actually tap into the full potential of your mind. I hope it goes without saying that mental stretching also has applications outside of guitar training. You can use it anytime you want to seriously consider two or more sides of an issue, be it political, spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and so forth.

Although I recommend you find a good teacher, you’re likely to spend most of your practice time without one. Therefore it’s imperative that you become both student and teacher. You need to discipline yourself to put the time in, and to prioritize quality practice over careless playing.

I think most of us have some concept of an excellent teacher. Maybe they’d be a mysterious master who has you digging holes, washing cars, or picking up trash the first week of lessons.

The point is, you need to be your own role model. You should become a master instead of waiting around for one. That awesome guitar-learning montage you have in your head can come to life, but only with you as the director.

I know you might think I’m asking too much here. Being a student is hard enough—how can you also be a teacher?

The truth is, studying and teaching are two sides of the same coin. They’re mutually-entailing opposites (to use a Daoist term). You’re never learning when you’re not teaching yourself, and you’re never teaching without learning something.

So when I say you need to be your own master, I’m not talking about some crazy hypothetical. I’m talking about reality.

The classical guitar legend Andres Segovia was fond of advising his students to be musicians first and guitarists second. He meant that musical matters were always of much greater importance than technical ones. It should also be said that you’ll improve much faster as a guitar player if you focus less on your fingers and more on the sounds you’re making.

Of course, being a musician means that you should spend time studying music itself rather than just guitar playing. What this looks like partly depends on your style of music, but it usually involves thoughtful listening and some level of theory competency.

Let’s deal with listening first. Naturally, most everyone listens to music. Yet what makes good musicians different is that they listen much closer than ordinary people. Rather than always playing music while they’re doing something else, they might set aside time to completely focus on it.

One great listening exercise is to concentrate on hearing different parts of a song with each hearing. You could single out the vocals first (that tends to be easiest), then the lead guitar part, then the drums, then the bass, and so forth.

Learning some music theory is another way to prioritize your musicianship. This ties into thoughtful listening above, since most theory courses involve at least some ear training.

I recommend you get yourself a book on basic music theory (if you’re new to it) and work through it a little bit every day. You might be surprised at how quickly you can learn the fundamentals of music! You can find my personal favorite books right here on my recommendations page.