Did You Learn Something New On The Guitar Today?

Are you trying too hard to become a better guitarist? It’s very easy to become deflated and lose a bit of enthusiasm when we feel like our progress is going very slowly. I couldn’t tell you how many days I have spent over the years just noodling around on the guitar and achieving nothing, but it’s a lot. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, sometimes it might be all we want to do. If however you do it too often then you really are wasting a lot of time that could be used to make you a better guitarist – without any real effort. Here’s what I mean.

When you are out of ideas or finding something too difficult, you’ll often put the guitar down or sidetrack into doing something else that you already know, or just noodle around the fretboard aimlessly. When this happens, take a few minutes and just do something you don’t know. This can be anything simple that doesn’t require much thought. For example, if you don’t know all of the notes on the fretboard, learn one. Just one. Commit it to memory. Got a lick that you use often? Learn it in a different position on the fretboard or a different key, or both. Do you spend most of your time playing scales ascending? If so, spend ten minutes playing them descending, or vice versa. Play a scale twenty times starting an eighth note after the beat. Start a scale with a lead in note before the beat. Learn the notes and intervals in one chord. Just learn something that you didn’t know yesterday or play something slightly different from your normal routine. No effort and no goals, just do it.

Simple ideas like this can seem trivial on their own, yet they are the building blocks of great guitar playing. They don’t seem like a big deal in isolation but the gradual, accumulative effect of these simple exercises are massive. They require little thought and no effort. Sprinkle these kinds of ideas among your noodling time and you won’t see any short-term benefit but I guarantee that after a year or two, they’ll make a big difference to your guitar playing as a whole, using time that would otherwise be completely wasted.