How to Practice Guitar

When you’re busy you not only have to make time to learn guitar, you also have to ensure you’re making the best of your time. But how do you make time?

Teaching yourself guitar runs the risk of developing some potentially harmful habits. You can avoid many common beginners’ mistakes with these helpful tips from David Hodge.

There are lots of guitar tutorials. Tom Hess explains how knowing precisely what you should be practicing will help you get the results that you want.

Jamie Andreas’ offers her secrets to “going for the music,” helping your musical performances channel the very soul of music from you to your listeners.

We’re going to try some more difficult speed drills. If you’ve been following Tom’s lessons on playing fast you’ll like these new more challenging patterns.

There are all sorts of barriers to playing fast. In his latest post Tom shares some practice tips for developing speed in all of your fingers.

Nick Minnion provides a short video lesson to help beginners add riffs taken from the blues scale into their playing.

Many guitarists will choke up when trying to play fast. Tom Serb shares some advice on keeping your muscles relaxed while practicing speed drills.

In this brief series of lessons, Tom Serb reveals some of the ways guitarists can learn to play much faster in a relatively short period of time.

Rob Gravelle, former guitarist of Canada’s Ivory Knight, shares his secrets of making sure your guitar sounds its best when working in the studio.

Students at Tom’s music school receive a booklet called “How to Practice Your Musical Instrument.” Here are some practice tips that apply to guitar.

Using a metronome during guitar practice is very helpful but it’s also important to know when not to use it. Tom Hess explores the reasons both for using a metronome and not using a metronome when trying to improve your guitar playing.

Many players obsess about not being able to play fast. Tom Hess offers some important tips for guitarists wanting to improve their playing speed.

Discovering the roots of impatience can lead to much more productive practice and better performance. Jamie Andreas teaches you how to become a patient person.

Here’s a very cool single-guitar finger style instrumental blues piece that will teach you about driving, single note bass lines and creating cool melody lines and fills.

In the final installment of her look at “The Learning Curve of Various Styles of Guitar,” Jamie Andreas examines what is needed to become proficient as a jazz or a classical guitarist.

Nick Minnion concludes his three-part series on solving timing and rhythm problems with a look at playing various eighth note, triplet and sixteenth note rhythms.

Guitar Noise presents the first in a new series of songs written specifically for guitar studies. Here is a cool blues number, reminiscent of Taj Mahal’s “Fishing Blues” to help you develop your finger picking, hammer-on skills and use of syncopation and timing.

Part 3 of Jamie Andreas’ “The Learning Curve of Various Styles of Guitar” examines the skill set needed to become proficient at rock guitar – all sorts of rock guitar styles. As with the past articles in this series, Jamie also provides you with excellent resource materials to supplement your learning as you hone your guitar skills.

Join Guitar Noise in welcoming Philadelphia-based guitar teacher Kale Good to our pages. In his first article, Kale lists out seven easy (and essential) steps toward becoming a better guitar player. They won’t make you a guitar god overnight, but they will set you on a path of successful playing for your lifelong guitar journey.