If you’re looking to practice guitar at home, you’ll want some kind of plan. It’s just too easy to get lost or sidetracked if you’re working alone.

But this kind of work can also be extremely rewarding if you do it right. Here are 8 secrets you need to practice better today!

Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference. Many guitarists get hung up on talk of scales, keys, chords, or the CAGED system when they don’t even like to practice.

And the first step of liking to practice is to have a spot. You need a proper home base, a space all your own to settle in and get to work.

Now, this doesn’t have to be a big space. It doesn’t even need to be a full room—a simple chair in the corner will do. But the key is to like to hang out there and play.

You want to establish a good feeling with your playing spot early on. Don’t choose the unfinished basement or the haunted attic. This needs to be a place you want to spend your time.

You might already have a space, of course, but if you don’t find yourself gravitating to it naturally, you may want to reconsider its location. Never settle for practice habits that aren’t working.

Improving at guitar is all about setting yourself up for success. If you can find a spot that feels homey and welcoming, you’re on the right track.

One of my favorite things about the guitar is that it can be quiet. I would even say it’s naturally quiet, obviously with the exception of electric guitar. Many people compare its dynamic range to that of a human voice.

If you’re like most of us, you either live with others or near others. That means, if you’re practicing a lot, you’re bound to annoy someone if you’re always playing loudly.

Fortunately, there are many effective ways to practice quietly. Here are some ideas:
 

• Practice normally, but keep your volume as low as possible. Try to make the guitar whisper. For electric players, just practice unplugged (even if it sounds a bit strange).

• Work on developing speed. Let it be said that speed is overwhelmingly the result of slow practice, but if you do throw in some speed drills, you’ll find it easier to go faster if you play softly.

• Isolate your left hand. This means instead of sounding notes or chords, you just practice fretting in silence. This is especially useful for working on difficult chord changes and scales.

• Isolate your right hand. Surprisingly, one of the best ways to train you right hand is by muting the strings (with your left palm). You’ll get percussive sounds out of the strings rather than the notes you’re used to, making it easier to focus on right-hand patterns you’re learning.

Almost all successful guitarists have at least one thing in common: a practice routine that works for them. To be sure, it’s almost impossible to do a lot of practicing if you don’t organize your time intentionally.

This means you’ll want to establish a good routine right off the bat. I already wrote a post on the Best Practice Routine for Guitarists, so you’ll probably want to check that out.

But basically, you want to cover all the most important aspects of practice every day. That is, you need what you value most to be part of your routine rather than left to chance.

Some of what’s important for you depends on your style of guitar, but generally speaking you want to cover technical training, repertoire work, and sight-reading and/or improvisation on a daily basis.

Remember that it takes some time to build new habits. It won’t happen overnight, so you’ll want to stay patient with yourself. If you occasionally slip up, don’t waste energy getting upset—just gently direct your attention back to the routine.

When you practice guitar at home, your motto should be “make haste slowly.” This means you work diligently and energetically, but also intelligently and carefully.

You probably want to get better fast, and I can understand that, but you should never feel rushed while you’re playing. In fact, slow and deliberate playing is by far the best way to make progress.

Think of practicing as laying bricks. Working fast to try to speed through a job will only produce shoddy work. And shoddy work may have to be redone, losing you a ton of time in the process.

The surest way is to make haste slowly. Lay each brick with care, yet work efficiently. For guitarists learning new pieces, each brick is like a measure, chord change, or scale run.

Ensure that every sound, every motion is just right before you move on, and you’ll lay a strong musical foundation. Also, always be willing to return to fundamentals if anything feels hard or insecure.

There’s a whole lot to learn about music and the guitar. Not only do you want to be building your physical ability to play the instrument, but you want to devote some time to furthering your guitar education.

But where do you start? Well, you might head to My Recommendations Page to check out my favorite guitar books. You can also watch videos online to fill in gaps in your theory knowledge. You can even begin a Guitar Ear Training program.

Obviously, you won’t be able to attack everything at once. Choose one thing at a time and build out from there. For instance, if you’ve never really understood the deal with scales, you might watch videos about them until something clicks.

The most crucial thing is to build a habit of continuing education. You want to be the type of person who’s hungry for knowledge and loves to learn.

You’ll typically find that great guitarists know a lot about their craft, just as you’d expect of violinists, pianists, cellists, singers, and so forth.

Now that you’ve become a student, it’s time to become a teacher as well. If you practice guitar at home without guidance, you need to become your own instructor of sorts.

Think of it this way: in an ideal world, you’d have a teacher overseeing your each and every playing session. Clearly you don’t exactly have that, but you’ve got you!

No matter how much of a beginner you are, you already should have the teaching chops to take on that role to a certain extent.

From this post alone, you know that slow, careful practice beats fast, thoughtless playing. But part of you has to actually enforce that knowledge in reality, and that’s where the teacher-side of you needs to come out.

And putting on the teacher hat may also encourage you to learn more about music and guitar playing out of a sense of professional pride. You can even go so far as to imagine (and take on) a teacher-persona that keeps the student in you on the right track.

No routine is perfect. So if you practice guitar at home, you’ll want to question your methods occasionally. Too many players adopt practice habits that don’t work, then doggedly stick to them.

Bear in mind that everything you do during practice should have a reason. If you want to get better, you want to cultivate a sense of what’s working and what isn’t, and be willing to change things up on the fly.

Another possibility is that your current strategy works, but doesn’t cover an element of guitar playing you care about.

For example, you could be getting comfortable strumming and changing chords, but ultimately want to write original songs. In that case, you’d want to carve out a specific amount of time each day to devote to songwriting.

It often helps to keep a practice notebook of some kind. This way, like a true scientist, you can log everything you’re doing and look back and analyze what tends to work best.

One last piece of advice: don’t lock in a practice routine unless you’re seeing consistent results.

Some guitarists who practice at home have issues around discipline. It’s not always easy to get psyched up for a playing session.

Christopher Parkening says that discipline is really about “ordering the priorities of your life.” You may want to think on how your daily schedule maps on to your system of values.

One strategy that works for me is Temptation Bundling. This is the practice of pairing something you want to do (like eating popcorn or watching TV) with something you consider work (like practicing guitar).

You make a pact with yourself: “If I practice scales for a half-hour, I’m allowed to watch one episode of Adventure Time.”

If you can hold yourself to it, this sort of bargain can really pay dividends for you. Even if you’d ideally spend all that time practicing guitar, the main thing to avoid is not practicing at all.