Overcoming bad habits is one of the hardest things for guitarists to do. Even if you make an effort to avoid bad guitar habits in the first place, chances are good that you’ve developed a few at one point or another. It might just be time for you to take a hard look at yourself and your practice routine to ensure that nothing’s holding you back.

This post is all about identifying bad practice habits and discussing how to fix them. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself on this list, and probably more than once.

This list isn’t in any order of importance . . . except when it comes to this one. In my view, practicing too fast is the single worst habit a guitarist can have.

The reason for this is that fast practice isn’t really practice at all. If you’re going too fast, it’s going to be very difficult to learn new material, play without mistakes, or listen closely to yourself.

Notice that I’m not defining fast playing in relation to exact playing tempos. The truth is, fast playing to an amateur guitarist might well be slow playing to an experienced one. It’s all relative to your own comfort level.

The way I see it, if you don’t feel at ease when you’re playing, or you’re making mistakes, or you’re rushed in any way, you’re playing too fast.
 

How to Play Slowly

Many guitarists understand that they should slow down their practicing, but they just can’t seem to do it. Although slow playing is a simple concept to understand, it’s perhaps the most powerful practice tool at your disposal.

Playing slowly is much easier said than done, and in fact most guitarists seldom do it. And the problem isn’t in their fingers—no, every guitarist has the mechanical ability to slow down—the problem is one of willpower and discipline. Habitual slow playing takes a great deal of mental strength and maturity.

One of the best ways to start playing guitar slowly is to discipline yourself to do a variety of other things slowly and pay attention to what results.

You’ll find, for instance, that lifting weights slowly is much more difficult than lifting quickly. Or you might find that driving slowly (though not dangerously so) is not only safer but more relaxing than being in a rush. Or you might even find that moving around slowly creates less sound than moving quickly–if you want to move about a sleeping person without waking them, you’ll naturally slow down so as to limit your noise.

The main point is that slowing yourself down is valuable in many areas of life. Once you experience that for yourself, you’re a lot more likely to to bring that into your guitar playing.

For more tips on slow playing, I highly recommend this excellent video.

All too often, guitar players are basically performing when they should be practicing. The problem, of course, is that performing is not the same as practicing, and in fact doesn’t truly count as practice.

By “performing,” I simply mean playing through a piece you already know, hoping that it gets a little bit better every run-through. The issue with this approach is that you’re likely to end up repeating the same mistakes over and over without addressing them directly.

Good practice is about intelligent repetition and problem-solving. Intelligent repetition means that everything you practice is technically and musically deliberate, while problem-solving is about isolating difficult passages until they become easy.
 

Why Practice = Ironing

Imagine that a wrinkled shirt represents the piece you’re working on. Each wrinkle is a problem-spot that needs to be smoothed out. Your goal is to iron your shirt such that you can wear it out without fear of embarrassment.

Performance is the act of putting on your shirt as it is, and trying to cover up the wrinkles as best you can while you’re wearing it. Practice is the act of ironing, of meticulously attacking every little wrinkle, top to bottom, with most of your effort focused on the most wrinkled areas.

This metaphor also conveys the idea that while performance is public-facing, practice goes on behind the scenes. Good practice doesn’t look like performance any more than ironing a shirt looks the same as wearing it.

You should try to discipline yourself to iron your shirts fastidiously, and to never wear a shirt in public that still has wrinkles on it.

If you’re looking for more information on how to practice, you should head to my recommendations page. You’ll find a selection of great books to use to learn how to practice well.

As you know, there’s quite a lot to be distracted by these days. Perhaps the most sinister of all modern distractions is the smartphone, a device that functions as a dual computer-communicator, an all-in one window to the larger world.

I don’t know about you, but if my phone goes off while I’m practicing, I usually can’t resist checking it right away.

For that reason, I highly suggest you put your phone on silent and put it out of sight when you’re practicing. I know that you might be waiting on an important text, call, or snap, but the truth is, you need to give your guitar the attention it deserves if you want to improve.

I’ve frequently advocated very short practice sessions on this site. You can get a lot done in 5 minutes, and even more in 15 or 20. The idea of practicing for an hour or more at once is both arbitrary and misguided, especially for lower-level players.

I know that you might not be able to neglect your phone for an hour or two without hurting someone’s feelings, but surely anyone can set down their phone for a micro-practice session without skipping a social beat.

Out of sight, out of mind rings absolutely true when it comes to phones. Even if you’re committed to ignoring your phone for 20 minutes, if you can see it light up from afar, that’s certainly going to interrupt your session.

Productive guitar practice is like a meditation; you need to keep yourself in the present, never straying from the task at hand. (This also applies to not performing when you intend to be practicing).

Every guitarist has weaknesses. Inevitably, some techniques will come to you easily, while others will seem impossible to master. You should expect this, but also know that every weakness is a potential strength—in many ways a much greater potential strength than what comes naturally.

You probably already know your strengths and weaknesses as a guitarist. Often it’s as simple as separating what you actually work on from what you ignore.

While it can be tempting to believe that your current weak spots will be weak forever, that doesn’t need to be the case. Rather, you should make an effort to “flatten” your technical and musical landscape until you’re a jack-of-all-trades kind of player.
 

Common Weaknesses

Although every guitarist is different in many ways, our common physiological traits tend to make certain techniques more problematic than others. There may be many styles of guitar, but we’re all human beings after all, and we have similar instrumental difficulties.

For instance, less experienced guitar players are bound to struggle to hammer-on properly with their pinky fingers. Naturally weaker and less coordinated than your other fingers, your pinky will always take extra work to bring up to speed. My recommendation is that you practice with your pinky at least four times more than your other fingers!

Another common issue guitarists can have is to feel comfortable shifting between strings on their right (or picking) hand. It’s easy enough to play adjacent strings, but jumping across two, three, or four strings can take some getting used to.

For fingerstyle players, it’s well worth practicing jumping across multiple strings while plucking with your thumb or with one finger alone, as if it were a pick. Ideally, you should be able to do so without looking, having developed a sophisticated mental map of each string’s location.

By “narrative,” I basically mean a sort of story you tell yourself about your relationship to music and the guitar. For instance, your narrative could be that you’re too old to learn guitar. Or too stupid or lazy. Or it could equally be that you’re the best guitarist who ever lived.

In any case, your beliefs have an extraordinary effect on your potential as a guitar player. In fact, they probably have more of an effect than your actual physical practice, especially since your narratives will largely determine your practice habits and attitude.

As you might imagine, you’re far better off having positive and optimistic narratives than negative and pessimistic ones. The former can inspire you to study and practice hard, knowing you’ll improve fast. Meanwhile the latter can actually discourage you from putting effort into the guitar.

After all, if you believe you’re not “naturally talented,” then why bother pursuing music in the first place?

The good news is that you get to choose how you think. In many ways, you eventually become what you continually reinforce in yourself, and this applies to your patterns of thought.

You should see developing and sustaining positive guitar-related narratives as essential mental work. To be sure, this mental work is more important than normal physical practice.

For more discussion on the value of mental work for guitarists, I highly recommend this post. It’s all about how to use the power of your mind to accelerate musical progress.