Why You've Stopped Improving On Guitar

If you've been playing for a few years, you practice consistently, but nothing is really changing, you're pretty much the same player you were six months ago, that's a very common issue. I've seen it in my own playing, and I've seen it in tons of students over the years. I boil it down to four common problems.

I'm putting the most important one first, so if you only have time for one, just read that and go.

1. You practice technique instead of music

The only reason to practice technique is to play the music you actually like listening to. That's why we all started. Nobody picked up a guitar because they wanted to do alternate picking exercises. Even if those are useful, that's not why we're here.

So I'm not saying don't practice technique. But it needs to line up with what you actually want to hear from your own instrument. There's no one in the universe who's going to hear you play guitar more than you. If you don't like what you hear, that's a big problem.

The best way around this, I've found, is to sit down ideally every day, put on some music you like, and just listen. I use an app called Transcribe. It's a Google Chrome plug-in, and basically anything you can play in the Chrome browser, from Spotify to YouTube to Instagram, you can set loop points, slow it down, pitch it up or down. It's amazing. Lots of apps do that already, but the main problem with most of them is that it's a ball-ache to get the sound into the app. With this one, whatever you can play in Chrome, you just pull up the plug-in and get to work.

So you sit with your guitar and a coffee, and you listen. When you hear something that makes you go "oh, that's really cool, I'd love to be able to play that," make a little loop and learn it by ear.

This is crucial. Learning things by ear is a lost art today, because everything is on a platter for you. Unless you have really obscure taste, whatever lick you're working on, you can find ten walkthroughs of varying quality on YouTube. Same with tabs. So you never really need to use your ears anymore if you don't want to. And that's a big problem. As Yngwie said, you play with your ears. Not literally, but you need to be able to listen and understand what's happening.

Doing this solves two things. You're working on your ear, and you're building a vocabulary of what you actually want to hear from your instrument. You'll also get a really clear picture of where your technique falls short of what you want to play.

There's a term I like: goal hijacking. You sit down, you really like Allan Holdsworth, let's say, and then you see some guy on Instagram playing a fast flashy picking lick, and you think, "I want to do that too." So you sit and practice picking exercises. Meanwhile, that's not really what you're after. You keep listening to legato players. You're working on something that isn't aligned with what you actually want to hear.

I'm not saying you can't work on more than one technique. But you really need to start from what you like the sound of. And listening like this every day is what shows you that.

It also shows you something else. You try to learn a phrase, and one of two things happens. Either you can play it right away, great, you have the technique. Or you get the notes down but you can hear it: your legato isn't where it needs to be to play this line cleanly. Now you have a real reason to develop that area. Suddenly the boring exercises don't seem dumb anymore, because you have a purpose for doing them.

2. You have no system

I used to go to the gym six or seven days a week and do full-body workouts. I was also running at least 5K every day with my dogs. As you can imagine, doing that for years really wrecked my body. And I didn't see much progress in body composition, despite putting in all the work I possibly could.

I was basically applying a Yngwie-style "more is more" philosophy to fitness, and it turns out that's not a great thing to live by, especially not for working out.

When I tried an actual program, it felt weird. Strength training three days a week, walking with the dogs on the off days, no doubling up. I started tracking my protein intake. I started tracking my weights to make sure they were going in the right direction every week. I wasn't tired all the time. And I got better results. That was quite shocking.

The same thing happens with practice. You spend an hour every day, you do your things, you do your exercises, and you feel like, well, as long as I'm tired at the end of it, that must be progress. But it's not. You're just tired.

When you play, you want to play things you can play, otherwise you'll sound bad and that's no fun. But when you practice, it should be something you can't play in your sleep. You need to find things that actually challenge you.

If you start your day with the 30 minutes of listening I described in point one, you're constantly exposing yourself to new material, and better yet, material you actually like. Because unless you're sadistic toward yourself, you're only going to work on things you like the sound of.

Now, having found a real gap in your technique or your scale knowledge or your timing, you know exactly what to put into your practice schedule. You can spend an hour and actually improve from day to day, because you're working on things that aren't yet under your fingers, not the same things you can already play.

You know what to work on. You know why, because it ties back to the music you actually want to play. And you have a way to practice it.

The tracking can be very simple. Look back and ask: can I play this better than I did last week? If yes, you progressed, and you know what you're doing is working. If you feel no difference from last week, you have to look into how you're actually practicing this. Maybe you're doing something wrong. Maybe you need some help.

When I got on a proper program at the gym, I stopped guessing. I knew exactly what to do, how to do it, and why. That's also what we do in the Practice Room Pro. If you come in there, you can send videos so I can help you get unstuck if I see something you might not. There's a free 7-day trial, so you don't really risk anything.

3. You're practicing too fast

For whatever reason, this one's a bit controversial. Some people are convinced you have to practice fast to play fast. And yes, you need to try things faster to be able to do them. Obviously. But you also need a huge amount of perfect repetitions for your brain to actually get what you want.

If you sit there sloppily playing the same lick over and over thinking, "let's keep doing this for another five years, it's just going to get better," it won't. Because you're teaching your brain the wrong thing.

You want to practice in two ways.

The first is slow enough that you can control everything. There are concepts I've talked about on the channel before, like finger choreography and how you prepare the next finger. I won't get into all that here. The point is that slow practice lets you focus on going from one note to the next as cleanly as possible, with the shortest possible transition time between notes regardless of the tempo. You can stay relaxed, and you can amass a ton of reps in a fairly short amount of time.

The second is speed bursts. Here you want to play as fast as you can, or as close to performance tempo as you can. To do that with something you don't yet have under your fingers, you need to remove a variable. So you reduce how many notes you're playing. Maybe you can only do the first two notes at speed, then you add the third, and you keep adding notes until you can play the whole thing.

Combine these two and you get the best of both worlds. The speed bursts teach you what motions actually work for you at or near performance tempo. You can take that information back into your slow practice and make sure you're not doing something silly. Because you absolutely can do silly things in slow practice too.

I think that's why slow practice has a bad reputation for some people. They do something completely different when they practice slowly than when they play fast, and then it doesn't translate.

These two modes of practicing are different sides of the same coin, and that coin is accuracy. Whether you're going slowly or going as fast as you can, you want accurate reps.

4. You're not recording yourself

When you're playing, your playing might feel tighter than it is. Your bends might sound in tune to you. Your picking might sound awesome in the moment. But when you listen back, it's full of flams and ringing strings. That's not because there's anything wrong with you. It's just that you're playing something that takes up a lot of RAM in your brain, so the analytical listening isn't quite there in real time.

Recording yourself is essential, because you can't fix something you can't hear.

The recording can be painful for the ego. I'd suggest listening back the day after, and try to reframe it as listening to someone else. Imagine a friend sent this to you. What feedback would you give him? Doing this a bit more systematically has helped my playing a lot. I record stuff anyway for YouTube and Instagram, but it's important to do it just for your own practice.

A bonus tip. When you listen back the day after and you find sections where you go, "actually, this sounds really good, I'm proud of this," upload that to Instagram. You can put it in the archive, or you can have a private Instagram, however you want to do it. The reason this is good is that it gets saved by date. So you can look back in two weeks, three weeks, six months, two years, and you have an archive of small clips you thought were cool at the time. If you find some of them are a bit dodgy now, you know you've actually improved.

Maybe this happened to you at some point. With my first electric guitar, after about six months, it started to sound really out of tune. The intonation seemed off. I was thinking, what's going on with my guitar? Turns out it was just my ears getting better. I could finally hear that it was out of tune.

That's the kind of effect you get when you improve overall. You listen back to what you thought was killer playing, and now you hear how rough it was. Which means whatever you think is good today is going to be vastly better than what you thought was good two years ago.

To recap

Focus on music first, so you know what to actually practice. Have a system, so you know your practice is moving you forward. Focus on perfection by either practicing very slowly or by practicing very fast with fewer notes. And record yourself.

None of this is about talent. These are areas you can focus on, and you'll get a lot better by doing so. If all of this is new to you, you're in a good spot, because you have a lot of improvement up for grabs.

Don't feel bad if you feel like you should have started doing this two years ago. The best day to plant a tree was thirty years ago. The second best day is today.

Go plant that tree, and I'll see you in the next one.