Guitar practice can be overwhelming sometimes. We only have limited time to play, and yet there’s so much we could be working on. What’s the best way to decide how to go about practicing?

For me, the process is two-fold. First, I list the most important things I’d like to work on. Second, I figure out how to incorporate each of those priorities into my daily routine. I’m a big believer in practicing everything I consider important every day.

If you’re not sure how to organize your practice time, fear not! This post should clear things up. By the time you finish reading, you’ll feel more confident in your practicing as a whole, ready to tackle any material you might be working on.

The last thing I’ll say before we dive in is that your practice routine should be wholly doable. By this I mean you don’t set yourself up for failure by planning to do so much that you get overwhelmed and do very little.

The key is to strike a balance. Be ambitious yet realistic. Always be willing to make adjustments if you’re not getting the results you want.

Scales are considered essential for many styles of guitar. Basically, if you’re looking to improve on the instrument, you should be practicing scales on a daily basis.

Perhaps the most famous book of guitar scales is Andres Segovia’s “Diatonic Major and Minor Scales.” In his preface to the book, Segovia explains why he believes scales are an essential practicing tool: 

The student who wishes to acquire a firm technique on the guitar should not neglect the patient study of scales. If he practices them two hours a day, he will correct faulty hand positions, gradually increase the strength of the fingers, and prepare the joints for later speed studies. Thanks to the independence and elasticity which the fingers develop through the study of scales, the student will soon acquire a quality which is very difficult to gain later: physical beauty of sound.

We can see that according to Segovia, scales help the fingers develop strength, independence, and elasticity. All of these things then combine to create beautiful sounds. I definitely like the idea of that!
 

But which scales? 

You might be convinced that you should be practicing scales, but not quite sure to how to get started. My advice for you is to find scales relevant to the style of guitar you’re most interested in.

The pentatonic scales are probably a great starting place if you’re playing electric guitar, for instance, and the Segovia scales are great for fingerstyle and classical guitarists.

I know many guitarists would disagree with this, but if you’re playing scales to develop your technique, it really doesn’t matter which scales you pick. The core actions of the fingers are essentially the same for any given scale. So go ahead and look up any guitar scale and get started!

Many guitar players believe they don’t need to know music theory. This belief doesn’t stem from careful reasoning, but from an aversion to learning something new and math-like.

My view is that every serious guitar player should do their best to learn some music theory. Now, I’m not asking you to become a musicologist, but I do think you should strive to know at least the basics.

There are many reasons to learn music theory, and I can’t possibly cover all of them here. The shortest, most all-encompassing reason to learn theory is that it will make every part of learning guitar easier for you. Knowing theory will empower you to master the fretboard, improvise, sight-read, and compose. You’ll have incredible analytical tools at your disposal!

For those who are still committed to avoiding theory, you’re only cheating yourself out of becoming a better player. It won’t hurt you to learn theory, so why not attack the guitar from another angle? And believe me, once you start learning theory, you won’t want to go back.

You may point to certain elite guitarists who “don’t know” theory, but the truth is, those individuals have basically become fluent in a language that they don’t fully understand. It’s a bit like learning to recite French phrases without knowing what they mean.

Plus, these theory-averse guitarists tend to know a lot more theory than they let on. For instance, they tend to know at least the fundamentals of music: notes, intervals, chords, scales, keys, and so forth.

If you’d like to begin learning music theory, you could do worse than to read this post.

We already talked about the importance of scales, but now I want to talk about technical work. This is the type of practice that makes you a more capable guitarist in general, regardless of the music you’re working on.

You can think of technical practice as a guitarist’s version of working out. Ask yourself, how well can I execute every little skill I need for guitar playing?

For instance, you may feel comfortable strumming but struggle to change chords. Clearly, you need to do some left-hand work. (If that sounds familiar, you might check out this post to speed up your chord changes).

Many of us struggle with hammer-ons and pull-offs. If that’s you, then your technical practice should include isolating those movements and drilling them until they’re no longer a weakness. If you’re not sure you’re doing them properly, check out a tutorial video online!

Barre chords are another common issue for virtually all guitarists. Steel-string acoustic players in particular will struggle with barring technique.

If barre chords are an issue for you, then you need to build up your left-hand strength. Force yourself to do some barring every day, even just for a few minutes.

The key is to repeatedly drill barre chords, rather than avoid them. Yes, you may feel like you’re hitting an absolute wall, but if you keep pushing, I guarantee you’ll break through! Check out this post for more help with barre chords.

If you’re a fan of this site, then you already know that I consider sight-reading to be the most important type of guitar practice. This is because sight-reading will yield more results per time invested than any other sort of work! It’s unbelievably efficient.

Those new to sight-reading should know that it’s the art of performing music that you have not seen or learned before. Simply put, it’s the challenge of putting new music in front of you and doing your best to play through it.

You may choose to use chord progressions, tabs, or standard notation (I recommend everyone learn to read the latter if they can).

Obviously, sight-reading can be extremely challenging. It forces you to learn a piece of music on the fly, asking your fingers to follow along with your eyes.

For many guitarists, the idea of playing a piece without first practicing it feels impossible. However, I’m here to tell you that not only is it a skill you can develop, it’s probably the most fun you can have playing guitar!
 

How to Start

The hardest part of sight-reading is getting started. Few of us are in the habit of reading new music, so we feel as if we’re going against the current at first.

Personally, it took me months of daily practice to become a confident reader, and it wasn’t always easy to get myself to do it.

You might think of sight-reading as going for a run (especially if you don’t run regularly). It’s difficult to motivate yourself to start, but once you do, and certainly when it’s over, you feel much better than when you started. Even your physical fatigue feels good in a way. Sight-reading is the musician’s equivalent of that.

If you’re interested in getting started with sight-reading, you should check out this post I dedicated to it. All told, the key is to get your hands on a lot of easy music (relative to your level) and read as consistently and frequently as possible.

Also, try not to look at your hands! One of the most valuable parts of habitual reading is that you’ll gain a spatial knowledge of the fretboard, which will allow you to play guitar without looking.

Like sight-reading, mental practice is something most guitarists neglect. That’s unfortunate, since mental practice is an incredibly powerful.

So how do you practice mentally? Well, for starters, you put away the guitar. You’re about to unlock the power of your mind, which is a force to be reckoned with.

One of the best things to do is to listen to a high-quality recording of the music you’re learning while following along with your notation. Learning a chord progression? See if you can track the changes in time. If you’re using tabs, you’ll be following strings of numbers across the page. With standard notation, you’ll be navigating a sea of dots.

The more you do this kind of practice, the more confident you’ll feel reading notation. You don’t even need to be learning the piece you’re listening to! As long as you can access some form of notation and listen to a corresponding recording, you’ll benefit from this type of work.
 

Other Forms of Mental Practice

Of course, there are many other kinds of mental practice. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend this post. It dives much deeper into this topic. For the sake of brevity, I’ll list a few other types of mental practice below:
 

• Listening to music (no score in hand, but with total concentration)
• Visualization with notation (imagine yourself playing as you read through your music)
• Visualization without notation (difficult but worthwhile)
• Studying videos of master guitarists (try to empathize with their movements)
• Mental sight-reading (perhaps the most difficult kind of practice, but it gets easier with experience)

Finally, here’s an interesting article on mental practice and its many benefits.