The most effective way to improve your guitar playing is to solve playing problems while practicing. Simply playing through exercises again and again doesn't help you improve. Correct guitar practice needs to help your playing feel easy while also making it sound good.
digital princess statement is the process to use to solve your guitar playing problems:
(Correctly) Isolate The Main Problem
When you struggle to play anything on guitar, stop and isolate the specific notes that are giving you problems. When you do this, your guitar practice gains the potential to be extremely effective. This also helps you by keeping you from wasting practice time on things that you can already play very well.
Amplify The Problem Area
As soon as you've properly isolated the issue that is giving you problems, you can make things infinitely easier for yourself by "amplifying" it. These are some basic ways to amplify any issue that gives you problems:
1. Continually repeat whatever is most difficult.
2. Move the difficult part to lower frets and play it there.
3. Use only up/down strokes to play the difficult part.
4. If the problem is related to articulation or 2-hand synchronization - play it on an acoustic guitar or an unplugged electric guitar.
5. Play the difficult part with heavier distortion/at a louder overall volume to fix sloppy playing.
Amplifying the problem like this makes the original issue seem much easier in comparison.
Attack The Problem Until It Is Fully Mastered
You're going to need to continuously practice the problem before you can totally master it. This approach will turn you into a much better guitarist anytime you repeat an exercise.
Make Sure To Focus On The Fundamentals
Construct a list of guitar technique fundamentals that you need the most improvement on. Once you have mastered these things you will fix your playing issue. A lot of guitarists who learned guitar on their own struggle with this (since they aren't working with an excellent teacher who can help them). The following are several guitar technique elements you need to pay close attention to:
- Having perfect synchronization between both hands, and playing with excellent articulation.
- Eliminating unwanted string noise by using muting.
- Maintaining strong power in your picking attack while making motions in both hands as efficient as possible.
- Getting rid of unnecessary tension in your body that makes playing guitar harder than it needs to be.
Don't Play Faster Than You Can Think
You need to totally engage your brain during guitar practice. To do this, practice at a speed that challenges your hands physically, but is slow enough that you can follow every note with your brain. This is the way to practice if you want to play with excellent guitar technique.
If you practice guitar at speeds that are faster than what your brain can follow, you will have a very difficult time making any amount of progress.
Integrate The Problem Area Into A Musical Context
Integrate the isolated issue back into its original context (once you have mastered it). Surround the problem area with notes to integrate it. Utilize this process to solve any guitar playing issue and get faster results in your playing than ever before.