Learn to play guitar -- play guitar like a pro

Lots of guitarists start with the dream of becoming a great guitar player. This dream is well within the reach of anyone willing to put in the work to learn their craft but consistetly putting in the work is what stops many people. Practice won’t always be exciting and will sometimes be downright boring if you don’t take it on with a plan and some discipline.


When you first start to play guitar, it’s easy to practice because you’re excited about getting to know the instrument. Without discplined direction or agenda, things are simple but this type of practice doesn't help you improve your guitar playing. Sooner or later you’re going to see or hear other guitar players that are playing things a little beyond your current ability and you’ll want to ramp your skills up so you play that well.

The good news is that everyone starts basically at zero and builds on their skills from there. How fast you excel or how far you go is entirely up to you but you can rest assured that having disciplined practice will allow you to go further faster.

You’ll want to pick specific times for practice. Pick times when you can concentrate just on the task at hand without anything interrupting you. Have all of your household chores and duties done and out of the way, homework done, dog walked, and everything else that could interrupt and interfere.

Create a practice plan and stick to it until each topic is very well understood and you can play it very fluidly and easily. You can break things up into categories like this for example:

- Warm up
- Major Scales
- Free jamming
- Minor scales
- Riffs from songs you like

...and so on.

The idea is that you’ll stick to the plan every day until you‘ve mastered the skills you're working on. Daily practice for five to ten minutes is better than weekly practice for an hour. The consistency and discipline of playing the guitar daily is important. Play slowly and cleanly and with a metronome if possible.

Resist the urge to want to play fast too soon. It will come with time, but you’ll be a much better guitarist if you take the time and effort to cleanly pick every note.

So you want to practice regularly and with a plan as well as play everything you learn very deliberately so you'll get it perfect before you move on. Once you’re confident that you’ve got it down, move onto something else to keep challenging yourself.