Many self-taught guitarists get stuck on the ends of the Practice-Play spectrum.
Instead, live in the middle.
Photo by Piret Ilver on Unsplash
There’s a BIG difference between playing guitar and practicing guitar.
Some people feel they need to practice all the time to get better. They rarely stop and smell the roses just to play something for the fun of it. They try to move the needle all the time. Other people play all the time - no routines or exercises. They just play their material following no particular path.
Learning guitar is about enjoying the process, the act of making enjoyable music at any skill level, and appreciating amateurship. But there’s no getting around it: becoming a confident, comfortable guitarist involves a necessary amount of practice. As in most aspects of life, it’s probably better to be near the middle of a dichotomy rather than on either end.
The problem is how to find the best of both worlds.
Separate playing and practicing
Strike a thick line between playing time and practicing time.
These are two totally different activities that require two totally different mindsets. It’s easy to think you’ve practiced all day when really you’ve played material you can already handle easily and didn’t challenge yourself. Good practicing involves deliberate planning and tracking - it’s hard - so chances are if you feel like you didn’t struggle with your practicing, it wasn’t that fruitful.
The first step in finding the space in the middle is to be specific about what you’re doing and when.
Make a specific space for practice
Create two separate physical spaces for each activity.
It doesn’t need to be separate rooms or anything, but designate a certain chair or space in a room as “practice” space. The space will be a cue for your to kick off your habit of practice. Much of the success with a daily practice habit is your environment. In the book Atomic Habits, James Clear says location is one of the most common cues to kick off a positive habit loop. It’s an especially helpful step in guitar playing where the line between practicing and playing can quickly become blurred.
Trust the power of habits to put you in the right headspace at the right time.
Don’t lie to yourself
Be honest with yourself.
If you’re the play-all-the-time person, purposely designate a certain percentage of your time to practice. Be deliberate about it. For example, everyday you pick up the guitar, you’ll spend 10% of the time in your practice chair. Do the inverse if you’re a practice-all-the-time person. If you find this difficult, that’s okay. Some people genuinely don’t know how to practice. They are play-all-the-time people by default and don’t know how to create a practice routine.
This is hard - forcing yourself to do something you’re not naturally inclined to do - but start small and count every little bit of success as a win.
Plan your practice and play with serendipity
Have your practice material highly structured. Have your playing material highly unstructured.
The spirit of these tips is to think of these activities as opposites. It’s easier to define what is and what isn’t with a harsh separation. It’s so easy to get stuck in the weeds and get into a state where you feel like you’re practicing for the sake of practicing. You lose your direction and never seem to get there. Your practicing bleeds into your playing too much, and vice versa.
Think of it this way: you’re making improvements toward some definable goal with practice and you’re following your nose of what’s interesting and satisfying while playing music.
At the end of the day, if you’re happy being a play-all-the-time person or a practice-all-the-time person, enjoy yourself. There’s no expectation from the world. But if you want to think about progressing and improving, it helps to be thoughtful and deliberate about what you’re doing and why.