So you’ve picked up guitar and practised all the basic chords, perhaps you’ve even learned to play a specific song. But what happens next? How do you guarantee your skills keep improving and you’ll continue to progress more than just one song at a time?

Here are five ways to help you achieve just that.

1. Create a Daily Habit

Perhaps the most common reason your progress may start slowing down is the fact that you don’t practice often enough. Maybe the feeling of learning a song makes you feel a bit too good and you forget there’s a lot more to do!

Create a daily habit of playing guitar. Whether it is 15 minutes or an hour every day the key is to pick that instrument daily. Make sure you also practice different and new things, as well as repeat the previous music lessons.

2. Start Improvising

You should also get started with improvisation. As soon as you build your chord vocabulary and you learn these little licks and tricks, you need to start putting them to good use. Although playing songs is fun, it can get too monotonous and you’ll end up just following notes instead of truly developing your skills.

Get yourself a few backing tracks to help with the beat and then just let go with the guitar. Play what comes to your mind and what sounds good to you. You’ll learn a lot more about melody and rhythm this way.

3. Film Your Playing

When you are playing a song or practising the scales, it can be hard to pay attention to the little mistakes you make. You’re often so concentrated in playing the next note right or getting the lick right that all you do is acknowledge you made a mistake and move on.

But analysing your mistakes and the reasons behind them can improve your skills. It’s therefore a good idea to film yourself playing guitar and then watch it back. Perhaps you’ll see something wrong with the posture, the position of your fingers or how a certain chord progressions always causes trouble!

4. Try Different Genres

The great thing about music is the fact there are so many options out there. There is great classical music, fantastic blues music and electric rock’n’roll – the genres are endless. Even though you might be aiming for a career in specific genre or you just prefer one genre to the other, don’t just play songs in that specific style.

Learning a few songs from other genres, as well as finding out the specific guitar playing styles of other genres will teach you a lot more about music. You can add much more depth to your playing by widening your musical repertoire.

5. Start Adding Your Own Touch to Songs

As a guitarist, you need to find your own way and style of playing and you should never just follow the songs note by note. Although at the start it will make easier to look at the tabs and follow them, but eventually you should start adding your own mark to the songs.

Consider playing the songs slower or faster. Perhaps you could perform it while fingerpicking or change the song’s genre around? Try out different things – not only is it fun, but it’ll also help you stay on the path of progress!