Guitar Tips | Practice – Don’t Practice Mistakes

Each time you play a guitar part, right or wrong, your body is learning it. How you practice is very important because of this. If you are practicing a song and consistently making a mistake on the same lick or chord change, don’t start from the beginning. You are teaching yourself to make a mistake!

Isolate problem areas and practice them separately. Take your time, playing the part slowly and correctly many times. Only then bring up the speed. It may seem like slow going but it takes longer to unlearn mistakes than to learn the part slowly but mistake-free.

A final critical step is to get these isolated parts back into the flow of the song. Expand the part by starting a measure or two before the trouble area and extending for a couple of measures after. That reconnects the part to the song as a whole.