[Newsletter] Making your guitar playing a daily habit is the best thing you can do to improve. Here’s how.
Tomo Fujita's 7 tips for self-taught guitarists; Video record yourself practicing
Hello!
Welcome to new subscribers this week. If it’s your first time receiving one of these emails, I write about strategies, tips, and frameworks to help self-taught guitarists have the best guitar playing experience they can.
If you have any questions or problems with learning guitar right now, feel free to respond to this email. I will get back to you.
If there’s someone you know who might like the newsletter, forward them this email!
Something to think about
Making your guitar playing a daily habit is the best thing you can do to improve. Here’s how.
In his book, Atomic Habits, James Clear does the math: if you get 1% better at something each day, that 1% gain will compound over the course of a year and by the end you will be 37 times better.
For a bunch of reasons, this daily approach is better than trying to get 7% better one day a week:
It will be extremely difficult to do the work of improving 7% in one day. The mental and physical stress will be overwhelming for most people.
It will be difficult to fit in enough time in one day to do this work. Are you going to block off 8 hours for guitar practice on Saturday?
By doing one big heavy lift each week, when you want to improve again in another 7 days you will have lost much of what you gained previously.
Obvious question: can you actually expect to improve 1% each day? In the beginning, sure. There are so many technical and musical concepts to learn, you can pull this off for at least a couple years. As you reach a point where your skills match your musical desires, you might not be able to sustain this rate of improvement, but your goals have probably changed at this point anyway and you’re not concerned with such a high rate of improvement.
But for self-taught guitarists looking to improve, how do you build a daily playing habit where you can reliably improve 1% each day?
James Clear lays out 4 steps to creating and maintaining this type of habit: cue, craving, response, and reward.
CUE (Make it obvious)
There needs to be a cue that signals you to pick up your guitar. As the first step, this cue kicks off the entire habit loop.
The best cues come from time and location. Since you’re trying to form a daily playing habit, whichever time and location you choose should happen on a daily basis. Think about your daily life and come up with some options to fill in this sentence:
“I will practice guitar at X time in X location.”
Examples:
• I will practice guitar in the morning in my practice space.
• I will practice guitar in the evening in the living room.
You can improve this formula by making the cue of your guitar practice a daily habit or occurrence that already happens for you each day:
Examples:
• I will practice guitar in the morning in my practice space after I make my coffee.
• I will practice guitar in the evening in the living room after I put the kids to bed.
• I will practice guitar in the afternoon in my bedroom after I get home from school.
CRAVING (Make it attractive)
If you’re the type to simply enjoy playing guitar and don’t like practicing (hey, that’s me!), then finding ways to make practicing attractive will be necessary to keep the habit loop moving.
Try to sandwich it in the middle of two habits you currently do with the last habit being something you want to do. For example: after I make coffee in the morning (habit I currently do), I will practice guitar (habit I need). After I practice guitar, I will watch some shitty YouTube videos (activity I want).
Other ways of making guitar practice attractive is outside influence.
Finding a group of people to play music with is one of the single best ways to make your practice attractive. If you have a regular jam set up with some friends, you know you will need to work on X, Y, or Z beforehand. If you play in a more serious band, you don’t want to be the one who showed up to rehearsal unprepared. Even just having one person you keep in touch with that is learning guitar too can make practicing more attractive.
Even though it takes effort, practicing doesn’t have to be work. You don’t have to practice guitar, you get to practice guitar.
RESPONSE (Make it easy)
Everyone is inherently lazy.
So make the act of practicing guitar as seamless and easy as possible with as little friction as possible between you and the act of practicing. Have your practice area set up and ready to go. You know what you’re working on ahead of time and where you left off last time. Your guitar is out of the case. Your practice resources are ready and organized. Your tuner, picks, and capo are all on hand.
If you still struggle to get started even with everything set up and ready to go, start developing your daily practice habit with the smallest approximation of a routine you can do: just do two minutes a day.
This works best if you put your practice time in the middle of your playing for fun time so you’re warmed up. Practice that lick at tempo, then do that CAGED exercise a few times, and you’re done. You practiced today. You’d be surprised at how powerful this is - once you get on a streak, you’ll want to keep it up and will start to see the benefits of daily practice.
This will motivate you to do more than two minutes and next thing you know, you have a full daily routine.
REWARD (Make it satisfying)
A reward for accomplishing your daily playing habit completes the habit loop and makes it more likely you’ll start the loop over again tomorrow.
An effective way to reward yourself for practicing is keeping track of the habit. Not what you practiced, or how well it went, or anything like that. Instead, there’s only one criteria: if you practiced that day or not. Keep a notebook to track your daily practice habit. At the end of your practice time, you will find it satisfying to check off the block for that day. Similar to how practicing for just two minutes can make your daily habit easier, tracking it can make it satisfying.
For me, this is especially effective if there’s a shorter time horizon.
For example, before the habit is established, the thought of practicing everyday for a year is daunting. But the thought of practicing everyday for a month is feasible. In the past, I’ve done 30 day challenges with myself and I find, with the end in sight, it’s easier to keep up with it everyday.
Even though the goal was 30 days, by the end you will probably have developed the habit and can easily maintain it for much longer.
Something to watch
Highly experienced and accomplished guitar teachers are always worth listening to.
Tomo Fujita is one of these people. After teaching loads of people in-person for years, he boils down his experience to seven tips self-taught guitarists should focus on. By picking seven ideas out of the thousands available, they are going to be high impact.
I like the way he organizes these tips because he splits them into two categories: technique and musical.
The first three tips are about creating consistent good habits for set up and technique. You’re developing the signal to yourself it’s time to get better. By setting yourself up the same way every time, you get into a mind state of momentum - all the good and easy things get done in order and helps you build toward the harder things.
When in doubt with these first three tips, video record yourself to make sure everything looks proper.
The last 4 tips are musical. An understanding of these four things catapult your ability to learn faster and make everything else you learn easier. How little theory or facts can you know to understand triads? It's easy to get overwhelmed by choices, but a short list like this from an expert helps narrow down what's really important.
Something to practice
In the above section, I mentioned video recording yourself when in doubt of form and technique.
This approach to practice goes back a long time. Practicing in front of a mirror is common for Classical guitarists who need to make sure their technique meets the expectation of the genre. Beyond Classical guitarists, it's useful for everyone to not just sit in front of a mirror, but video record themselves for two reasons:
You can judge your technique and positioning outside the act of playing
You can hear what you're playing as well
Having video and audio of yourself practicing speeds up how fast you learn.
As a self-taught guitarist, you don't get the benefit of a teacher to coach you through the right steps and adjust your technique as you go. In other words, you miss out on an essential part of deliberate practice.
Video record some of your practice sessions and be either pleasantly surprised or horrifyingly shocked.