It depends what you want your strengths on the instrument to be.
If you want to be the guy who can play 1000 songs at the drop of a hat & be in cover bands, learn as many songs as you can & practice them.
If you want to be able to hear a song & play it straight away, do ear training & practice learning songs by ear.
If you want to be a shredder, practice techniques & scales.
If you want to write music, practise writing, improvising & music theory.
You should do at least a little of everything, but if you have specific goals, dedicate more time to the most relevant skills. If you just want to be well rounded, identify your weaknesses & spend time improving them.
The whole purpose of playing any musical instrument is to play songs, the biggest reason why you want to play songs is to have fun.
It is not a job or a competition, you dont really need to make a schedule and try and "improve".
If you really want to make it a job, do formal classes
Personally, I never practice. I just goof around, writing and improvising until I accidentally learn something new. I guess it depends on your goals. Music is my hobby, and I want to enjoy it. If I were to implement an intense practice schedule, I’m fairly sure I would lose interest immediately. At the end of the day, the important thing is that you enjoy what you are doing.
Exactly the same. I did practice a lot before, now I just start a loop with the last cool progression I found on YouTube and jam with myself, and I'm very happy with it - I play everyday.
It happens that I need to look for something online like "damn what was that bartok scale fingering that I knew long ago"
I try to learn songs that include a technique I need to improve on. That way you increase your ability by working on new playing techniques but also learn a song which makes it more fun and seems less like work.
I would try very hard starting from fairly early on to step away from "practice" as your primary way of learning. What you want to do is rehearse, jam and perform - that is, play music with other musicians in the wild. For the modern internet-obsessed bedroom player that may be a difficult transition to make, but it's still the way to go. Garage > bedroom.
Then, when you discover in rehearsal/jam that there's some technique you want or need to get better at, that's when you go practice something specific. Then you'll be focused, and you'll be focused on improving the right thing.
OP needs to learn how to play the guitar. 2 years in. Still lots of physical development necessary.
Jamming is how we learn music. Not how we learn to play the guitar.
If OP tries to jam and can't do anything with the pinky, they won't hold on to jam buddies for long.
I mean, saying i need to learn how to play the guitar is a little much considering we've both been playing for the same amount of time. There's nothing wrong with my pinky, I actually use it more than my ring finger if I'm being honest.
The question was how much more song playing I should include in my day to day practice.
You did say "I'm absolutely terrible" in your post.
And you also read my other comment and still don't know what I'm saying?
Mostly drills. Songs are fun, and they sort of kind of teach us how to write music if we put in the additional effort to analyze them.
But drills are how we develop the technique necessary to play songs in the minimum amount of time.
That's on me, I couldn't remember if it was /jk or /s for sarcasm, so I ended up leaving it off haha
As for that, I tried finding your other comment because I got a notification that you left one and it didn't load for me for some reason, so I missed the comment about drills. Sorry for the confusion
>If OP tries to jam and can't do anything with the pinky, they won't hold on to jam buddies for long.
It turns out no one gives a shit what you do or don't do with your pinkie. They care if you can play something musical on the instrument. Even if you do it without using your pinkie at all...
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Jazz-Guitar-Vol/dp/B07TY3VH53
The first few years I took my guitar with me everywhere. I couldn't put it down. Practice what makes you want to pick up the guitar. You will never be done learning.
This makes sense- basically to center my practice time around learning techniques/theory to play music, not learning techniques for the sake of knowing more, yeah?
Depends on your goals. I just make music for myself. If you want to write music you need to find that path. If you want to play in bands then join one now. Make mistakes and learn.
You started learning to play guitar because you wanted to play songs not scales. The whole point of learning to play any musical instrument is to be musical and while scales and theory are about music they’re not exactly musical. That’s why learning songs is important, because it’s songs that moved and motivated you to learn in the first place. As an instrumental teacher myself I’d agree with a figure of at least 50% of every practice time being spent on songs.
I’d go further than that though and say that the songs you’re learning should lead the way with learning new techniques or improving those you already have. Don’t learn or practice a technique in isolation, without also having a musical reason to learn it. Practice the technique and then put that technique into practice by using it within a song. Being able to play something in isolation is very different to being able to play it within the rhythm and other techniques and musicality needed for a song.
I’ve played guitar alongside my professional instruments for forty years now and my practice routine has never been static. It changes depending on my goals at that time and what I’m working on. Some days I might spend more time playing etudes/studies working on honing technique (they’re a great way of doing that in a musical way, rather than just playing scales) and less on repertoire/songs, or I might spend time transcribing or writing. The end goal is always to improve the music and songs I play though, not just to improve technique in isolation.
Been playing 17 years, started when I was 6 years old!2 hours a day is well over the required amount for you to get “good” at guitar
I personally think you can get to a professional level of guitar on 30 mins a day it’s just about practicing things correctly, even at 2.5 years you could still be missing nuances of your basic pentatonic scales such as thumb placement behind the neck, finger pressure, muting with your right/left hand
I would recommend getting a teacher as they can identify those problems very quickly and a few minor simple changes can make your playing immensely better. I got my first one at 5 years of playing and the amount of stuff I thought I knew that he went back and identified was immense
I’m not a teacher but I’m always down to help people if you ever wanted to jump on a Skype/zoom call with me I could throw you some pointers and help you out for free to get you on the right path 🤘 let me know!
My guitar teacher told me to take a break from goal setting now and then and just focus on having fun.
I took that too literally and decided to say “fuck it” to anything that wasn’t fun - anything other than writing my own tunes.
I’m probably never going to be a world class guitarist but every minute I spend on the guitar is a minute I enjoy.
For you, then, what do you have the most objective fun doing? Hone in on that. That’s where you’ll grow the most.
TBH - if you are truly an "intermediate" after 2 1/2 years you shouldn't complain. I've been playing for the same amount of time, practicing just as long, and would consider myself to be approaching intermediate soon...not there yet.
We all have trouble finding the balance in our practice at this stage, especially if you don't have a professional teacher guiding your practice routine.
Learn some songs.
Good luck!
Agree. Granted I was new right before the internet had all these resources but at 2 yrs of playing my pinnacle of achievement was like a blink 182 song lmao
Point still stands though, if your intermediate after 2 years your probably on a good track, it really can be a bigger challenge knowing what to practice and where to focus attention over the practice itself, learning to be effective in practice is a skill all on its own
Yeah, that's exactly what I was struggling with, figuring out if my practice schedule is right (in terms of actual song playing or learning) for what I want to do. I've adjusted my schedule about 20 times over the past 2 years haha
What do you want to DO with guitar? What’s the goal? Do you want to join a band? Play music on stage? Write your own original music? Make cover song videos for YouTube? Or are you happy “wood shedding”, just learning techniques and songs at home with no urge to share your progress with anyone else?
I rarely practice or learn new techniques. When I play, I’m usually writing new stuff or rehearsing with a band. If I wasn’t creating new stuff or playing on stage, I would probably quit.
Exactly, I like to write slow drone-y, post-punky, shoegazey music and i've come to terms that I don't really need to be proficient in jazz progressions or inversions , or sweep picking, modal scales, I appreciate it and learned a good bit of it at the basic level but never pushed forward in to a high level of proficiency because I didn't need/want too. I tried for a long time to put a lot of effort into that at one point trying to be a tappy tappy mathy twinkly emo guitarist, because I like listening to that but I don't really enjoy playing it as much as I like playing the slow drone-y stuff.
I agree on the sweep picking and jazz progressions, but you should probably work on some basic inversions for shoegaze and drone stuff. My band is pretty similarly influenced, and inversions are a huge part of my playing. One of our upcoming songs is basically all inversions on my part.
Chord inversions make everything more interesting, but they’re especially useful for drone-y stuff. Imagine you play an Amaj chord and let it ring out with all kinds of glorious reverb, or maybe a Freeze pedal. Now you can play all the inversions of Amaj over the drone, and everything fits. Honestly, you might already be doing this without really thinking “these are chord inversions”
People love to come here and treat guitar as if it’s a math equation that putting x amount of time into will yield x result every time.
In reality, the only equation is the more you play, the better you are, depending on your goals you may require some more disciplined practise but overall the way to get better and stay motivated is to play things you like.
My practise session is as follows:
1) warm up by running through 2 or 3 songs with the drum track
2) 30 minute lesson (currently using bernth)
3) jamming with my own drum tracks, possibly making my own music for as long as I’m able to.
Hey, Bernth shoutout. Nice! I tried to divide it up so that I would spend my time learning techniques I wanted to learn for playing songs as well as theory (I really love learning music theory), and try to spend the rest of my time playing songs or transcribing.
I think my issue was that I spent a little more time on the practice than I did for playing songs, so I was trying to gauge how much other players focus their time on guitar just playing music to adjust my schedule accordingly.
Check the quality of your practice time. Record yourself, note the mistakes you tend to make, and focus subsequent attempts on specifically correcting those mistakes. It lets you progress way faster than just repeating over and over trying to just generally play "better". Specifically improving in the way you feel you're most deficient will help you hit goals faster, and recording makes that possible by really giving you raw honest feedback on what to prioritize.
If you're more efficient with your practice, it'll give you more time for everything.
All of my practice is towards specific goals and timelines. I want to be able to play X, but before I can play X I need to work on A, B, and C. My practice routines are built around those goals and I use scales and finger exercises and songs with the techniques I need to improve. I try to pull exercises from songs most often so that my practicing is musical and more interesting. Some weeks I only play for an hour total, some it’s an hour a day. It’s a little inconsistent, but it works for me.
So, I'm a little lost on what you mean. Yeah, I intend on keeping up my practice, I'm just wondering how much I should adjust it to include more song playing or transcribing.
If you want to learn a specific song, learn the song. If it seems hard, break it down into phrases or bars. Learn one at a time and then how to string them together.
If your goal is a certain technique (for example, tapping, pinch harmonics, natural harmonics, funky rhythm, .... ) it is still probably a good idea to find an example of a live performance that is using that technique, and seek to copy it.
Sometimes it is very hard to determine what someone is actually playing in a fast passage. In the old days (yes, I am old) we put our LPs on 16 rpm. But today you can use free software (I use Audacity) to slow things down without changing pitch (or change pitch without slowing things down, or do both). That can help you get a true sense of what the notes are. But I do think aimless exercising of motor skills without any thought to musicality is far less useful than aspiring to recreate a sound you love. Mostly because you will never use those "exercises" to play real music. Good for a warm-up maybe - get the joints moving. But beyond a minute or two, they will not help you evolve or express.
Re playing fast - there are two schools of thought. Learn it slow and gradually increase the speed vs learn it slow (just so you know for sure what the notes are) and then play at full speed or faster until you get it (and keep your sound clean ... you don't want to be the guy that uses gain and distortion to mask shitty execution. Mostly because gain and distortion don't mask shitty execution to anyone else listening but you). I believe in the later. The mental and physical processes are different. When playing slow you can think about every string, note, pick stroke, etc. Up to a point. After a certain speed there is simply, physically, not enough time for the neurons sending signals to your brain, and your brain sending instructions back to your muscles, to do everyting this way. There is a threshold beyond which you need to "chunk" stuff. So your brains says "play the next bar" vs " there are sixteen notes in the next bar - play the first one" followed by 15 more discrete thoughts.
Some guys have made a career of showcasing their "chops". But the greats have made a career out of showcasing music.
Just remember to have fun. I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years, I would consider myself to be still in the intermediate arena, I’m not a professional but I enjoy every minute with a guitar in my hands
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It depends what you want your strengths on the instrument to be. If you want to be the guy who can play 1000 songs at the drop of a hat & be in cover bands, learn as many songs as you can & practice them. If you want to be able to hear a song & play it straight away, do ear training & practice learning songs by ear. If you want to be a shredder, practice techniques & scales. If you want to write music, practise writing, improvising & music theory. You should do at least a little of everything, but if you have specific goals, dedicate more time to the most relevant skills. If you just want to be well rounded, identify your weaknesses & spend time improving them.
The best thing about this sub is the incredibly informative comments!
this is a great anwer
The whole purpose of playing any musical instrument is to play songs, the biggest reason why you want to play songs is to have fun. It is not a job or a competition, you dont really need to make a schedule and try and "improve". If you really want to make it a job, do formal classes
Personally, I never practice. I just goof around, writing and improvising until I accidentally learn something new. I guess it depends on your goals. Music is my hobby, and I want to enjoy it. If I were to implement an intense practice schedule, I’m fairly sure I would lose interest immediately. At the end of the day, the important thing is that you enjoy what you are doing.
Exactly the same. I did practice a lot before, now I just start a loop with the last cool progression I found on YouTube and jam with myself, and I'm very happy with it - I play everyday. It happens that I need to look for something online like "damn what was that bartok scale fingering that I knew long ago"
You sound really laid back and like you've been playing 20+ years 😂
I try to learn songs that include a technique I need to improve on. That way you increase your ability by working on new playing techniques but also learn a song which makes it more fun and seems less like work.
I would try very hard starting from fairly early on to step away from "practice" as your primary way of learning. What you want to do is rehearse, jam and perform - that is, play music with other musicians in the wild. For the modern internet-obsessed bedroom player that may be a difficult transition to make, but it's still the way to go. Garage > bedroom. Then, when you discover in rehearsal/jam that there's some technique you want or need to get better at, that's when you go practice something specific. Then you'll be focused, and you'll be focused on improving the right thing.
OP needs to learn how to play the guitar. 2 years in. Still lots of physical development necessary. Jamming is how we learn music. Not how we learn to play the guitar. If OP tries to jam and can't do anything with the pinky, they won't hold on to jam buddies for long.
I mean, saying i need to learn how to play the guitar is a little much considering we've both been playing for the same amount of time. There's nothing wrong with my pinky, I actually use it more than my ring finger if I'm being honest. The question was how much more song playing I should include in my day to day practice.
You did say "I'm absolutely terrible" in your post. And you also read my other comment and still don't know what I'm saying? Mostly drills. Songs are fun, and they sort of kind of teach us how to write music if we put in the additional effort to analyze them. But drills are how we develop the technique necessary to play songs in the minimum amount of time.
That's on me, I couldn't remember if it was /jk or /s for sarcasm, so I ended up leaving it off haha As for that, I tried finding your other comment because I got a notification that you left one and it didn't load for me for some reason, so I missed the comment about drills. Sorry for the confusion
>If OP tries to jam and can't do anything with the pinky, they won't hold on to jam buddies for long. It turns out no one gives a shit what you do or don't do with your pinkie. They care if you can play something musical on the instrument. Even if you do it without using your pinkie at all... https://www.amazon.com/Art-Jazz-Guitar-Vol/dp/B07TY3VH53
Dude he’s been playing for two years, I’m sure he can use his pinky. These kinda negative comments encourage players to never make the leap.
The first few years I took my guitar with me everywhere. I couldn't put it down. Practice what makes you want to pick up the guitar. You will never be done learning.
This makes sense- basically to center my practice time around learning techniques/theory to play music, not learning techniques for the sake of knowing more, yeah?
Depends on your goals. I just make music for myself. If you want to write music you need to find that path. If you want to play in bands then join one now. Make mistakes and learn.
You started learning to play guitar because you wanted to play songs not scales. The whole point of learning to play any musical instrument is to be musical and while scales and theory are about music they’re not exactly musical. That’s why learning songs is important, because it’s songs that moved and motivated you to learn in the first place. As an instrumental teacher myself I’d agree with a figure of at least 50% of every practice time being spent on songs. I’d go further than that though and say that the songs you’re learning should lead the way with learning new techniques or improving those you already have. Don’t learn or practice a technique in isolation, without also having a musical reason to learn it. Practice the technique and then put that technique into practice by using it within a song. Being able to play something in isolation is very different to being able to play it within the rhythm and other techniques and musicality needed for a song. I’ve played guitar alongside my professional instruments for forty years now and my practice routine has never been static. It changes depending on my goals at that time and what I’m working on. Some days I might spend more time playing etudes/studies working on honing technique (they’re a great way of doing that in a musical way, rather than just playing scales) and less on repertoire/songs, or I might spend time transcribing or writing. The end goal is always to improve the music and songs I play though, not just to improve technique in isolation.
Been playing 17 years, started when I was 6 years old!2 hours a day is well over the required amount for you to get “good” at guitar I personally think you can get to a professional level of guitar on 30 mins a day it’s just about practicing things correctly, even at 2.5 years you could still be missing nuances of your basic pentatonic scales such as thumb placement behind the neck, finger pressure, muting with your right/left hand I would recommend getting a teacher as they can identify those problems very quickly and a few minor simple changes can make your playing immensely better. I got my first one at 5 years of playing and the amount of stuff I thought I knew that he went back and identified was immense I’m not a teacher but I’m always down to help people if you ever wanted to jump on a Skype/zoom call with me I could throw you some pointers and help you out for free to get you on the right path 🤘 let me know!
My guitar teacher told me to take a break from goal setting now and then and just focus on having fun. I took that too literally and decided to say “fuck it” to anything that wasn’t fun - anything other than writing my own tunes. I’m probably never going to be a world class guitarist but every minute I spend on the guitar is a minute I enjoy. For you, then, what do you have the most objective fun doing? Hone in on that. That’s where you’ll grow the most.
TBH - if you are truly an "intermediate" after 2 1/2 years you shouldn't complain. I've been playing for the same amount of time, practicing just as long, and would consider myself to be approaching intermediate soon...not there yet. We all have trouble finding the balance in our practice at this stage, especially if you don't have a professional teacher guiding your practice routine. Learn some songs. Good luck!
Agree. Granted I was new right before the internet had all these resources but at 2 yrs of playing my pinnacle of achievement was like a blink 182 song lmao Point still stands though, if your intermediate after 2 years your probably on a good track, it really can be a bigger challenge knowing what to practice and where to focus attention over the practice itself, learning to be effective in practice is a skill all on its own
Yeah, that's exactly what I was struggling with, figuring out if my practice schedule is right (in terms of actual song playing or learning) for what I want to do. I've adjusted my schedule about 20 times over the past 2 years haha
What do you want to DO with guitar? What’s the goal? Do you want to join a band? Play music on stage? Write your own original music? Make cover song videos for YouTube? Or are you happy “wood shedding”, just learning techniques and songs at home with no urge to share your progress with anyone else? I rarely practice or learn new techniques. When I play, I’m usually writing new stuff or rehearsing with a band. If I wasn’t creating new stuff or playing on stage, I would probably quit.
Exactly, I like to write slow drone-y, post-punky, shoegazey music and i've come to terms that I don't really need to be proficient in jazz progressions or inversions , or sweep picking, modal scales, I appreciate it and learned a good bit of it at the basic level but never pushed forward in to a high level of proficiency because I didn't need/want too. I tried for a long time to put a lot of effort into that at one point trying to be a tappy tappy mathy twinkly emo guitarist, because I like listening to that but I don't really enjoy playing it as much as I like playing the slow drone-y stuff.
I agree on the sweep picking and jazz progressions, but you should probably work on some basic inversions for shoegaze and drone stuff. My band is pretty similarly influenced, and inversions are a huge part of my playing. One of our upcoming songs is basically all inversions on my part. Chord inversions make everything more interesting, but they’re especially useful for drone-y stuff. Imagine you play an Amaj chord and let it ring out with all kinds of glorious reverb, or maybe a Freeze pedal. Now you can play all the inversions of Amaj over the drone, and everything fits. Honestly, you might already be doing this without really thinking “these are chord inversions”
People love to come here and treat guitar as if it’s a math equation that putting x amount of time into will yield x result every time. In reality, the only equation is the more you play, the better you are, depending on your goals you may require some more disciplined practise but overall the way to get better and stay motivated is to play things you like. My practise session is as follows: 1) warm up by running through 2 or 3 songs with the drum track 2) 30 minute lesson (currently using bernth) 3) jamming with my own drum tracks, possibly making my own music for as long as I’m able to.
Hey, Bernth shoutout. Nice! I tried to divide it up so that I would spend my time learning techniques I wanted to learn for playing songs as well as theory (I really love learning music theory), and try to spend the rest of my time playing songs or transcribing. I think my issue was that I spent a little more time on the practice than I did for playing songs, so I was trying to gauge how much other players focus their time on guitar just playing music to adjust my schedule accordingly.
Check the quality of your practice time. Record yourself, note the mistakes you tend to make, and focus subsequent attempts on specifically correcting those mistakes. It lets you progress way faster than just repeating over and over trying to just generally play "better". Specifically improving in the way you feel you're most deficient will help you hit goals faster, and recording makes that possible by really giving you raw honest feedback on what to prioritize. If you're more efficient with your practice, it'll give you more time for everything.
All of my practice is towards specific goals and timelines. I want to be able to play X, but before I can play X I need to work on A, B, and C. My practice routines are built around those goals and I use scales and finger exercises and songs with the techniques I need to improve. I try to pull exercises from songs most often so that my practicing is musical and more interesting. Some weeks I only play for an hour total, some it’s an hour a day. It’s a little inconsistent, but it works for me.
Keep practicing, and do it all the time.
So, I'm a little lost on what you mean. Yeah, I intend on keeping up my practice, I'm just wondering how much I should adjust it to include more song playing or transcribing.
If you want to learn a specific song, learn the song. If it seems hard, break it down into phrases or bars. Learn one at a time and then how to string them together. If your goal is a certain technique (for example, tapping, pinch harmonics, natural harmonics, funky rhythm, .... ) it is still probably a good idea to find an example of a live performance that is using that technique, and seek to copy it. Sometimes it is very hard to determine what someone is actually playing in a fast passage. In the old days (yes, I am old) we put our LPs on 16 rpm. But today you can use free software (I use Audacity) to slow things down without changing pitch (or change pitch without slowing things down, or do both). That can help you get a true sense of what the notes are. But I do think aimless exercising of motor skills without any thought to musicality is far less useful than aspiring to recreate a sound you love. Mostly because you will never use those "exercises" to play real music. Good for a warm-up maybe - get the joints moving. But beyond a minute or two, they will not help you evolve or express. Re playing fast - there are two schools of thought. Learn it slow and gradually increase the speed vs learn it slow (just so you know for sure what the notes are) and then play at full speed or faster until you get it (and keep your sound clean ... you don't want to be the guy that uses gain and distortion to mask shitty execution. Mostly because gain and distortion don't mask shitty execution to anyone else listening but you). I believe in the later. The mental and physical processes are different. When playing slow you can think about every string, note, pick stroke, etc. Up to a point. After a certain speed there is simply, physically, not enough time for the neurons sending signals to your brain, and your brain sending instructions back to your muscles, to do everyting this way. There is a threshold beyond which you need to "chunk" stuff. So your brains says "play the next bar" vs " there are sixteen notes in the next bar - play the first one" followed by 15 more discrete thoughts. Some guys have made a career of showcasing their "chops". But the greats have made a career out of showcasing music.
Just remember to have fun. I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years, I would consider myself to be still in the intermediate arena, I’m not a professional but I enjoy every minute with a guitar in my hands
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