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!

Motivation is a wonderful thing to have, but all too often, it isn’t there when you need it the most. Even though guitar is a fantastic instrument to play, too often beginners stop playing after a while because the motivation to improve just isn’t the same once things get harder.

So, what can you do if you lack the motivation to continue with your guitar lessons? Here are some simple tips to make sure playing guitar is fun and challenging without becoming too difficult and boring.

Divide Your Practice

Don’t just leave out a lump amount of time for your practice. If you say you are going to play for an hour, it’s more than likely you find yourself just jamming away with no clear structure and goals. In the long run, this will halt your progress and it will be harder to stay motivated when you don’t feel like you’re getting better.

Instead, divide your practice sessions for shorter time slots and plan in advance. For example, your hourly practice session could look like this:

• 5 minutes for warm up exercises
• 10 minutes for repeating what you learned last time
• 15 minutes for chord practice
• 15 minutes for learning scales
• 10 minutes for playing a song you want to master
• 5 minutes for jamming

Mix and match the timings and the things you do, so that each session looks and feels a bit different. This guarantees you continue learning different aspects of playing while also having fun.

Create a Habit

You need to make practicing a habit, instead of just doing it whenever you have time or when you feel like playing. If you are the kind of person to lose focus quickly, consider practicing for 30 minutes, doing something else for an hour and playing another 30 minutes later.

If you have a lot of time in the morning, then make guitar practice your morning jog. Set yourself cues and reminders that let you know it’s time to practice!

Don’t Just Play

Learning guitar is much more than just playing the actual instrument. You need to know a bit about music theory as well as develop your listening skills in order to conquer the instrument.

Don’t spend all of your time playing along guitar lessons or by jamming on your own, but do occasionally just listen other people play or read about music theory. This will develop your own guitar playing abilities and ensure you progress quicker than if you solely focused on playing the guitar.

Find Other Musicians

Sometimes group support is such a powerful way to boost your own motivation. If you talk with other guitarists and people involved with music, you will be more inspired to keep improving yourself and you’ll find it easier to share your feelings without being questioned. Every musician knows what it feels like to lack confidence from time to time and sharing your feelings can help you feel better and relight your motivation to play.

Take Time Off

While it is essential to keep a regular practice schedule and to try stick up with guitar lessons even if you don’t always feel like it, you shouldn’t ever force yourself to play. Occasionally, we all need to take a break and do something else. Make sure you have enough opportunities to do other things in your life and don’t be too hard on yourself if you skip a practice session – as long as you don’t do it regularly! Just pick the guitar and continue from where you left once the inspiration strikes.

Guitar players need to have flexible fingers to master all those different licks and riffs. Insufficient finger flexibility is one of the biggest things that can halt your progress and make the whole experience more frustrating and even painful.

But you don’t need to have long, sleek fingers to master guitar playing. As long as you remember to regularly stretch your fingers, you can ensure you learn the more difficult chords and keep your fingers in good shape. These simple stretches are perfect for improving your finger flexibility.

Warm Up Stretch

Before you start playing, it’s a good idea to warm up your fingers. This simple stretch is both great warm up exercise as well as a stretch to do even when you aren’t about to play guitar.

Simply place your fingers one at a time on top of a table, or other flat, sturdy surface, and gently press the finger against the table. You want your finger to slowly bend backwards. Don’t over do the bending or force your finger to an uncomfortable position. After you’ve done each finger, gently squeeze your fingers into a fist and open wide again.

Use the Guitar’s Neck

Before you play a few stretching exercises on the guitar, you can use the guitar’s neck for a quick warm up stretch. Hold the guitar and create a V shape between two fingers (for instance, your index finger and the middle finger) by having the guitar’s neck between your fingers. Then gently push the two fingers apart. Do this for all of your fingers and hold the stretch position for 15 seconds.

After you’ve done it with all of your fingers, you should wiggle your fingers around a bit.

Simple Chords to Play

After you’ve done the above warm up stretches, you can play a few exercises with the guitar. These simple notes will help you ensure your fingers stretch into the difficult positions required by some licks and riffs. Make sure you know how to read tabs before you start!

First Example

The following tabs show you the notes to play. The numbers on the tab represent the fret you need to play. The specific fret will be played by the following finger:

12^th fret – index finger

15^th fret – third finger (ring finger)

16^th fret – fourth finger (pinky)

———————-|———————-|———————-|–12—-15—-16–|

———————-|———————-|———————-|———————-|

———————-|———————-|–12—-15—-16–|———————-|

———————-|———————-|———————-|———————-|

———————-|–12—-15—-16–|———————-|———————-|

–12—-15—-16–|———————-|———————-|———————-|

Second Example

This example also has other frets you need to play and you can choose the finger you want to use to play them. But again, the 12^th, 15^th and 16^th fret are played with the specific fingers mentioned above.

———————-|———————-|———————-|–12—-14—-16–|

———————-|———————-|———————-|———————-|

———————-|———————-|–12—-14—-16–|———————-|

———————-|———————-|———————-|———————-|

———————-|–12—-14—-16–|———————-|———————-|

–12—-14—-16–|———————-|———————-|———————-|

———————-|———————-|———————-|———————-|

———————-|———————-|———————-|———————-|

–15—-13—-11–|———————-|———————-|———————-|

———————-|–15—-13—-11–|———————-|———————-|

———————-|———————-|–15—-13—-11–|———————-|

———————-|———————-|———————-|–15—-13—-11–|

Third Example

For the final exercise, you have one more fret to play each time, but everything else is the same as above.

————————|————————|————————|————————|

————————|————————|————————|————————|

————————|————————|————————|-12—14—15—17-|

————————|————————|-12—14—15—17-|————————|

————————|-12—14—15—17-|————————|————————|

-12—14—15—17-|————————|————————|————————|

————————|————————|————————|————————|

-11—13—14—16-|————————|————————|————————|

————————|-11—13—14—16-|————————|————————|

————————|————————|-11—13—14—16-|————————|

————————|————————|————————|-11—13—14—16-|

————————|————————|————————|————————|

Few Tips

When you are trying out the following exercises remember to ‘listen to your fingers’. If it hurts a lot, then give them a break and try again later, and if the pain persists, check with your GP what might be causing the problem.

Don’t practice any of the stretches for too long. A few minutes, perhaps 10 minutes in total for all the exercises, is enough each day.

If you keep doing the above exercises, you will notice a difference in your finger flexibility and even the toughest guitar licks will become a lot easier to conquer.

Improvisation is an essential part of improving your guitar technique. Although it sounds a simple thing to do, improvisation can be surprisingly difficult to master. The good news is that you can boost your improvisation and therefore enhance your guitar playing skills by adding drums to your sessions.

Here are some tips on how to use drums as part of your guitar improvisation.

Real Drums or Backing Tracks

Practising is always more fun when you can play together with other people. If you have a friend who plays the drums or you can find other musicians in your area, then check if they’d have time to jam with you for an hour every week, for example.

But don’t worry – if you don’t yet know a drummer or if it seems hard to set up the time to play with others, there are other options available as well. You can use backing tracks, which are widely available online. You can find Youtube videos or even use drum-playing apps to make your own!

Try Different Time Signatures

The most important thing is you don’t just use a single backing track to play with. There are different variations when it comes to the beat, tempo and even genre, and you want to play with these – even if you are destined to be a heavy metal guitarist. You can always learn something useful from other tempos and genres!

One of the most important aspects is to improvise to different time signatures. Make sure you use drums in ¾, 4/4 and 6/8 signatures, for instance. This will guarantee you need to change your own way of playing each time – not to mention it makes practice session more fun!

Listen to the Beat

When you add drums to your improvisation sessions, don’t just start playing immediately. It’s very important to learn to listen to the music. If you use a backing track or if a drummer is providing you with a beat, take a moment to listen what the beat is all about. Start slowly and just add a few chords that you feel fit the rhythm well. As you get them fitted into the music, you can start adding more ‘meat’ (i.e. chords) to your improvisation.

It’s also a good idea to listen to famous guitar riffs and how the guitarists have used the drumbeat to come up with the rhythm. Make sure you check out guitarists like David Gilmour and Jimi Hendrix and try to find the connection between their solos and the drums.

Challenge Yourself

Your guitar skills will develop faster if you set yourself goals and challenges. Make your guitar improvisation a bit more fun as well by challenging yourself. Try to learn to improvise to a different drumbeat in a week or in two weeks, for example.

After each practice session, think how well you did and what parts you are still finding difficult. Analysing your playing will give you more tools to focus on the aspects you find difficult and it will boost your learning process. After you master a specific drumbeat, make sure you reward yourself with a new CD or even a night out in town!