Beginner Guitar Practice – Get Great Results By Creating An Effective Guitar Practice Routine

It is easy to become overwhelmed when creating a guitar practice routine. 

Trying to determine what to practice and how long to practice it in order to get great results is difficult for the beginning guitarist. 

Today’s lesson will help you get some balance in your guitar practice and help you make good use of your beginner guitar practice time. 

As a beginning guitarist, a good guitar practice routine system that you can use to practice guitar is to set up categories relating to different areas of guitar technique and theory and select specific drills, scales, chords, exercises and songs for those categories.

The reason we will focus on categories for your beginner guitar practice is ...

... that you will quickly find that it is difficult to practice everything you know on the guitar every day after you have been playing for awhile.

Your volume of “guitar stuff” to practice will grow very quickly.

To avoid overwhelm and keep your practice on track, let’s look at creating some categories that are important to a beginner guitar practice plan and learn how to select practice items for that plan. 

Here are some good guitar practice routine categories to start you off:

• Chords           
  • Learning Chord Fingerings
  • Chord Changes
    
    

• Strumming
  • Pick Grip
  • Strumming Technique
  • Pick Hand Muting
    
    

• Single Note Picking
  • Riffs
  • Chord Arpeggios
  • Scales
    
    

• Ear Training
  • Major and Minor Chord Sounds
    
    

• Song Practice
  
  

• Music Listening and Study

The reason a guitar practice routine like this is so effective is that it targets the specific skills you are trying to develop, keeps practice from getting boring and you are also able to change and adapt it as you improve and learn new skills on the guitar. 

Beginner guitar practice should be focused on helping you develop the specific skills that will help you become a good, fundamentally sound guitar player. 

For example, it is not necessary to practice every chord you know every day or time that you practice. 

If you are working on building chord change speed between a G chord and a D chord, as you develop speed between those two chords, your chord change speed between other chords will increase, too.

Nothing is practiced in a vacuum. 

As your control over your hands improves playing one set of chords, the improvement will “spill over” into other areas of your guitar playing as well.  Focus on building the fundamental guitar skills with your guitar practice routine.

Those fundamental skills can be categorized using the areas we have outlined above.

Short, focused practice sessions based on specific goals will keep you moving forward and improving on the guitar.  Create a guitar practice routine and a beginner guitar practice plan and you will improve more quickly.

Enter your information below to download a free practice plan template that you can use to keep your guitar playing focused and on track while developing the fundamental guitar skills you need to become the guitar player you want to be.

Learn to play now with guitar lessons for beginners online