Submitted by: Serena C. Yeo

Taking guitar classes alone is not enough to accelerate your improvement as a guitar player. After learning new skills from your teacher, you also need time on your own or with fellow guitar student to practice the guitar skills you just learned.

Your guitar lessons should come hand in hand with a regular and systematic practice if you are determined to master the guitar. Practicing skills you just learned also makes learning more exciting. For an effective guitar practice, here are some things you need to remember:

Practice Regularly

Most of the time, guitar students have the mindset that after they ve learned from their lessons, they do not need to set a schedule to practice their guitar-playing anymore. Moreover, there may be a lot more important things they need to attend to such as your work and family. But if you are truly determined to master the guitar, you’ll be able to manage your time and find schedule for your practice.

You do not need to set one whole day to hone the new skills you learned from your guitar lessons. An hour is enough to help you retain the lessons and improve your skills up one level. You can even divide the one hour practice to two or three mini-practices throughout the day. That is, if it i not possible for you to practice for straight one hour. A short yet regular practice of your guitar skill is better than a longer but sporadic one.

Diversify Your Practice

If you want to make your practice more exciting, you can also search for new materials other than the ones provided during your guitar classes. For instance, if you just have learned new strumming skill or chords, try to find a more difficult song that you can practice with and challenge yourself.

Every time you learn something new, try to put some spice on it by experimenting on your own. When you just learned a new chord, try different techniques in picking and fretting. You can also experiment with your timing and see if you can diversify your sounds.

Record Your Sound

To see whether you are improving or not, you might want to record your performance. You do not need to record the whole practice, but only document a single performance instead. If you are learning a new song for instance, practice the proper strumming of the chords. After a few tries, get a video camera or audio recorder and document the performance. If you can t perform an entire song yet, doing a few chords you just learned is enough to determine how you sound. Listen to your performance after recording and note your mistakes and anything else that needs improvements.

If you are not confident in critiquing yourself, you can ask your teacher or other adept guitar players to listen and comment on how you play. You’ll notice that eventually, when you have gained your confidence in guitar-playing, you also learn how to improvise. As a student, you also need to keep in mind that you don’t attend guitar lessons to copy and play popular songs. You must learn to develop your own style in guitar-playing.

About the Author: Serena Yeo is a music instructor in Singapore who loves to share her extensive knowledge of music and the art of performing to her students and blog readers. Visit her site at

guitarlessonssingapore.com

or call 8168 8251.

Source:

isnare.com

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