A New Approach to Guitar Practice

How to use projects to get rid of procrastination, confusion, and overwhelm.

Photo by Lawless Capture on Unsplash

Over the last few years, I started floundering in my guitar practice.

Between a demanding job and a drop off in motivation, I went a long time without getting better at guitar. I knew there should be a balance between improvement and just playing for fun, but going all this time without any noticeable improvement made me feel not great. In other words, my lack of improvement started ruining my guitar playing experience.

My ruined guitar playing experience boiled down to these problems:

• Procrastination

• Starting something but not finishing it

• Big ideas of what I’d like to learn with no follow-through

• No evidence of getting better/always doing the same old thing

• Working on something, only to forget it later and never use it again

I've tried different solutions.

Just the usual stuff - things like different types of practice schedules and routines, setting timers, and keeping track of BPM. These solutions never seemed to fix the motivation problem. If anything, they made it worse.

But now I’m happy to have found an approach to guitar practice that makes it easier to improve. I finally feel like I'm thriving rather than floundering.

I’ve been sharing it in pieces over the last few weeks and I’d like to sum it up and clarify exactly how and why it’s helpful.

A new approach to guitar practice

This approach is a specific process for a specific type of improvement. It’s not supposed to take over your whole guitar playing life.

It’s a way of using projects to give you a structure to learn new concepts, techniques, and repertoire that are musically meaningful to you and above your current ability level.

In other words, this isn’t about playing things you already know, learning songs that don’t stretch your abilities, or playing licks and riffs that are already comfortable.

Instead, this approach is:

• A system for consistent, reliable, and low friction improvement in your guitar playing

• A way of designing practice sessions to make sure every minute of your practice time is in service of your goals

• A philosophy of practicing that isn’t just about improving, but creating a positive guitar playing experience

• A transformation from floundering to thriving

To be clear, I don’t use this approach every time I pick up my guitar.

I pick up my guitar and play freely for fun all the time. But with this approach, I can easily enter “practice” mode and, with the steps in place, create projects that push me to learn concepts, techniques, or repertoire that move me toward my goals without the confusion and overwhelm that has plagued me in the past.

Why are projects the driving force?

By projects, I mean concrete, tangible artifacts.

In modern times, focus becomes critical with the amount of content and resources for guitarists. It's no wonder so many people flounder in confusion and overwhelm. Instead of chasing one shiny object to the next without actually committing to anything, completing a project gives you a finite amount of steps that means you can either perform or not - no in between. This allows you to cut out so much of the fluff and just focus on the most important things to complete the project.

Read more about why projects help floundering guitarists focus their improvement

Here are the four steps to create this simple approach

Collecting project ideas

Since this approach is about improving by completing projects that are just out of your current ability level, choosing the right project is important.

This is the first step in dwindling down your distractions and putting you on track. Choosing stuff you’re interested in and having it be the right difficulty can be tough, but it’s not an exact science. Instead of looking for the perfect project (which might lead to procrastination), picking a perfectly fine project is great.

Read more about collecting project ideas

Designing your project

When it’s time to start a project, the next step is deciding what kind of concrete, tangible artifact to make.

There are many different reasons to learn guitar: playing songs, jamming with others, getting to a professional level, be a part of different genres, and lots in between. The reason you want to learn a certain thing will determine the type of project you’ll make. Some are easy and some are hard. You get to choose what you work on and when you work on it to keep your motivation up while still making improvements.

Read more about designing your projects

Designing your tasks

Planning is all well and good, but you aren’t making any improvements until you get to work.

This is the hard part. In the past, I would get inspired to learn something today, get started on it, only to lose that motivation and forget about it the next day. So I put in a day’s practice with nothing to show for it. When you have specific projects to bring you closer to specific goals and learn how to break them down into specific tasks, motivation matters a lot less. With this approach, I’ve found I can always sit down and do at least one task at any time. And the beauty is this: once I get started, it’s way easier to keep going.

Read more about breaking down your projects into small, achievable tasks

Maintaining knowledge/repertoire

As projects get completed, you have a record of what you spent time and energy on instead of it getting forgotten about or lost forever.

You don’t have to rely on your memory for what you’ve learned in the past. I know I’ve forgotten way more than I currently know and I wish I had kept better track of previous efforts. This approach takes that into account and gives you a little structure to review what you’ve learned every now and then.

I’m thinking about running a short live course in January to teach people how to put these steps into practice.

So if you are:

• Tired of feeling stuck in a rut

• Confused about how to improve at guitar

• Overwhelmed by the amount of content out there

But ready for:

• A weekly or monthly cadence creates a deadline for accountability

• Learning in line with current neuroscience research on how we do it best

• A Balanced approach to building and maintaining musical skills

• A record of what you know with video/audio of how you play it

• Something to show for your work

• Reducing content overload - everything you learn becomes intentional

• Minimizing distraction/working on something once and never looking at it again

Respond to this email or reach out to justplaythething@gmail.com and let me know if you're interested in joining!