- Do you ever feel like it takes you way too long
to learn things on the guitar?
Or even like your practice sessions could
just go a lot better and a lot smoother?
Hey, I'm Nate Savage and I want to talk to you about
five huge mistakes that I've made in my practice time,
and still sometimes kinda seep back into my practice time,
so you can be aware of them,
avoid them in your practice time,
and get better a lot faster on the guitar.
(guitar playing)
- Oh, it's fine, it will clean itself up.
I'll just keep practicing.
(guitar playing)
I don't think this one can be overstated,
because when you're practicing,
learning something new,
and you make a mistake and you kinda blow right through it,
you tell your brain that it's okay to make that mistake,
and you basically program your brain
to play something wrong.
And that can create a lot of problems down the road,
and it takes a lot of discipline to actually stop
when you hear a mistake and correct it,
but when you do that you save yourself so much time
learning new things.
You can save yourself hours, weeks, and even years
of practice.
The second huge mistake is practicing too fast,
and I know we as guitar players hate practicing slow,
I know you do because I do too.
But the truth is that slowing something right down
is the fastest way to learn it faster and get it cleaner.
(fast guitar playing)
- Oh, it's fine, it'll clean itself up,
it'll work itself out.
(guitar playing)
I read a book called The Practice of Practice,
and in this one section it was telling a story
about this instructor at this conservatory for
string players and he was telling his students
if I can recognize or if someone can recognize
what song you're learning,
or what tune you're playing as you're learning it,
then you're playing it too fast.
That's a really good rule of thumb to go by
when you're first learning a song.
What song is this?
(slow guitar playing)
- Now if you can tell what song that was,
that means that if I was just learning that song
that would be too fast for me to practice that.
And you know I've had the opportunity to meet a lot of
just world-class musicians over the years,
and they always say the same thing
and it's kinda scary and uncanny how
it's verbatim the same thing.
They say if you're having trouble with something,
or if you're just learning something
then slow it right down.
That's the phrase that they always use,
slow it right down.
And if you can discipline yourself to implement this
in your practice time it's one of the keys to getting
better faster on the guitar or any instrument.
And the cool thing about this is you
can feel it when you enter into this kinda practice mode,
you can actually feel it,
that your brain is retaining things properly
and you're not making mistakes
and you're learning really well,
you're doing it right.
The third way to sabotage your practice time is
inconsistent practice and by that I mean if you're only
practicing once or twice a week,
then you're really shooting yourself in the foot.
I remember probably the first week of music school,
our theory teacher for our class told us,
"If you're a music major and you're not practicing at least
"an hour a day everyday of the week,
"then you're kidding yourself
and you may as well leave now."
Now I know we're not all music majors
and we don't wanna all be, you know,
world-class musicians but if you wanna
get better at the guitar and you're not practicing,
you know, four to six times a week
at least 20 minutes a day very consistently,
then you're gonna make it really frustrating for yourself.
It's gonna be a lot harder to get better.
So start small,
start a practice schedule.
You can use your phone to set up reminders
or an actual physical calendar,
but make a plan and stick to it.
That'll help you be consistent with your practice.
Number four is practicing without a plan,
and this is kind of a two-parter.
The first part of this is setting smart goals,
and the second part of this is having an actual plan
when you go into any practice time
or practice session that you're going to be doing.
SMART is an acronym for goals that are
specific, measurable,
achievable, relevant,
and time-bound.
As guitarist we tend to say things like
I wanna be a great guitarist,
or I wanna be a great finger-style player,
that's way too broad,
or maybe I wanna be a great blues lead guitarist,
that's still way too broad.
The problem that a lot of guitar players run into
when they sit down for some practice time
is they don't know what to practice,
and taking some time to set very specific
and achievable goals can really help
you know exactly what to practice
when you sit down with your guitar.
Probably the most important part of these goals
is setting a time limit on this.
So if you wanna learn,
you know it could be anything,
something specific, if you wanna learn your blues scale say,
I'm giving myself two weeks to be able to play through
this blues scale at 70 beats per minute,
or something like that.
Get really specific.
The second way that we tend to practice without a plan
gets even more specific and it,
you know, refers to individual practice sessions.
We need to have a goal for each practice session
that we sit down to,
something that's measurable,
that we can say at the end of the practice session,
hey did I achieve this or did I not achieve this?
And I have a pretty good little kinda template
that you can follow here if you need some help
setting up your practice time.
First off, start off just by warming up.
Do something that you know will
get your hands acclimated to the guitar.
After that, go into a super focused time
of practice where you're working
on that one thing that you wanna accomplish
in that practice session.
After that, it's important to set aside some time
to just jam and have fun on the guitar.
What that does is setting aside the time
to just have fun ensures
that you also are using a good chunk of your practice time
to work on something that's new
and that's part of your SMART goals
and then you can, you know, spend 10, 15 minutes
just jamming, having fun on the guitar.
After that, the last thing you should do
is assess your practice time that you had
and say did this work?
Did I make the progress I want?
If so, great, kinda continue down that road,
if not re-evaluate and make some tweeks.
The fifth and most devastating practice mistake
is not practicing with a musical goal in mind.
- So, uh, you play guitar?
- Yeah! I play guitar, man.
- So, like, you know any songs,
or do you play anything?
- Songs? I know G, C, and D.
- That doesn't sound like Wonderwall to me.
- Something as simple as that tune Wonderwall
can sound great and you know,
this is the whole purpose that we pick up
the guitar and practice anyway,
is to play music,
whether it's original music,
learning covers,
or just improvising over chord changes,
if you're not making music then what's the point?
You can practice a scale all day
but if you can't play anything with it,
then what good is it for you?
So my encouragement for you for this one
kinda goes back to number four,
setting goals.
As you set your goals make sure that there's
a musical point or a musical end
to everything that you're working on,
again whether it's cover tunes,
writing your own music,
or just being able to improvise
and jam over a chord progession,
that is the key to getting better,
or at least one of them.
So as you think about everything we've talked in this video,
make sure as you're planning your goals
to at least write down a short list of songs
that you'd like to learn in the future.
To always have handy, you should always have
at least one or two going.
Here are few books that I've read over the years
that have really helped me out
as far as my practice time.
The Practice of Practice is something
that will really kinda convict you
as far as how you're spending your practice time
and make your practice routine a lot better.
The Inner Game of Music,
I actually heard about this book from John Petrucci,
not from him, from a video that he did,
and it's one of his favorite books,
and it's about the internal game of music,
what's going on in your mind,
in your practice time and when you perform,
it just helps you a lot, get kinda your mind
under control so you have a productive practice session
or performance.
The Talent Code is all about talent,
you know, the eternal debate,
is somebody born with talent, musical talent,
or can they develop it.
And I think you can develop it,
and that's the main summary of that book, too,
and it just tells you how
to kinda tap into that internal talent
and as far as your practice time, too,
that's a really important way to do that.
And the last resource I have for you to check out
is anything by Noa Kageyama.
He is a, I believe he's a professor at Julliard,
but he has this website called
www.bulletproofmusician.com
that has a lot of really good tips and concepts on it.
I just learned a finger-style tune
that normally would have taken me
at least a month to get down,
but I was really focused and tried
to implement all of these practice tips,
as far as practicing slowly,
not practicing through mistakes,
and it cut it down to about two 1/2
or three weeks so it saved me a lot time,
even though in the moment it didn't feel like it.
It felt like it was going really slow,
but that's just evidence that these tips really do work.
Thanks for watching.
Don't forget to like and subscribe,
and if you have any tips that have helped you
in your practice time,
don't forget to share them in the comments
with the community.
See ya later.
Do you ever feel like you forget the words on the script?
It happens to me everyday of my life.
- [Man] It's like, wait a sec.
- Wait a sec, that's not in there.
I'm Nate Savage and in this video,
I wanna talk to you about the five biggest
(guitar strum)
- Mistakes.
No that's not how I wanted to start this.
Do you ever (guitar strum).
Hold on a second.