Practice doesn’t have to be a “four-letter word.” Simply by maximizing your time, you can get through the mechanics of practice and get onto playing guitar…. which is the fun part anyway, right? However, it is practice that helps us realize our creative visions with music. I am going to give you some tips on how to best use your time for practice and also some exercises to help you warm-up.

Warming Up

First, I like to talk about warming-up. This is a good thing to get into the habit of because you can have a more effective practice session if you are physically prepared as well as mentally prepared. I will give some examples of exercises that will help get your hands in sync with one another and also get the blood flowing to your fingers and arms. None of the examples here are musical per se in their presentation here, but that is not to say ideas can’t be generated from these exercises. If you have two hours set aside to practice something, take the first 20 minutes of that and use that time to warm up.

Example 1 is an exercise designed to get your fingers moving and get your pick moving across different strings.
I find it particular helpful if it has been a few days between practice sessions (sadly, I don’t have the time to practice like I used to). It is good to play this exercise using alternate picking. Play through it twice, on the first run though, start on a down stroke and then start it over again with an upstroke.

Example 2 is more of a two-string group exercise. It gets your fingers moving in opposite directions, which will help with the independence of each of your fingers.

Example 3 is in an odd time, 6/4, but the primary purpose of this is gain accuracy when crossing strings when your fingers are needed to play closer together and then quickly move further apart. Practice all of these at slower tempos and then gradually increase the speed on the metronome.

Practice

The key to effective practice is time management. If you have two hours set aside to practice and really dig into a subject, use that time wisely. Another key component of practice is to set goals. I am sure you have heard (or read) this before but, there is a reason it gets said over and over again…. IT WORKS!!! For example, set a goal for the day and focus on it. If you want to learn all of the inversions on all of the string groups of a C Major triad arpeggio (C, E, G), (see examples 4a 4b and 4c)…
…then take those two hours and divide it up so you can get that information burned into your brain. You might want to take the first string group, (for the sake of this example these will be the low E, A & D strings) and find all of those possible inversions on that string group all over the neck (For those of you who may be unfamiliar with inversions, it is playing the same notes of the given triad, in the is case, in different order and/or different places on the neck). You may want to practice each string group for 25 minutes each. You could practice going through them to a click and going back and forth between all of the inversions without missing a beat. In doing this, you essentially are practicing on three things at once; you are learning the arpeggio shapes, training your ears on the sound of these arpeggios and their inversions, and practicing your rhythm skills. Try and find ways to practice things that will focus on more than one area of your playing at once. With the warm-up exercises I talked about earlier, you can also use those to work on your ear training, listening to the different intervals, or you can mix up the rhythms i.e. triplets or groups of 5 instead of… the combinations are limited only by your imagination.

Practice doesn’t have to be negative; in fact, you could wind up like me and actually like and look forward to doing it! That is where a lot of your ideas for songs or riffs will come from…. when you are in that meditative state of focus, that is when creativity slaps you upside the head and plants the seed for that next killer solo or progression. Besides, if you love to play guitar as much as I do, (you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t) then practicing won’t be something you have to force yourself to do; you’ll just want to because it’s playing the guitar.