The Practice Problem: How to Play Guitar When You’re Busy, Distracted or Overwhelmed

Chris Morton
Alex Paddock

It’s the oldest phrase in the book: ‘Practice makes perfect’

But ‘practice’ is a wide-reaching umbrella term, and if you’re not doing it in the right way, you’ll find that you aren’t really progressing with your guitar at all – it could even be hindering you.

The problem is, everyone has a different idea of what practice is. For some, it might be 10 minutes of noodling along to a jam track, for others, it could involve a rigorous 2 hour routine of scales, arpeggios and transcribing songs. Neither is technically ‘wrong’, but practice is about finding a strong balance between the technical stuff that will reinforce the foundations of your playing, and actually playing things that you find fun – addressing errors or problems along the way.

So, in this blog, we wanted to give you an idea of why your practice routine might not be working (if you can call it a routine at all…), how you can find solutions to making it more effective and how it can work for you personally – no guitarist is the same.

Step 1: Setting Goals

The best way to keep motivated with your practice regime is to set yourself some goals so you know where you’re heading. This also helps with measuring your progress.

Write down a list of all the goal ideas you have for playing guitar. Perhaps at this stage of your learning, this might be playing a whole song from start to finish, or to begin writing your own music.

Now you might have come up with quite a few, so go through them and start crossing them out until you have just one or two goals that you can focus on. You can ‘procrastinate’ on the rest and save them for later.

Keep those one or two goals pinned up somewhere visible in your practice space so everytime you go to pick up your guitar, you know what you’re working towards and instead of mindless practice, you’re more likely to work on something that will move you closer to achieving that goal. You might even find it helpful to put a date on that goal if you feel like you really want to push yourself to focus, but try to be realistic. Set yourself too tight a deadline and you’ll only feel disappointed when you haven’t got there by that date.

Go Through My Goal Setting Worksheet

(you’ll find this inside the course in the first module)

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This is a written exercise that will help you clarify your goal even further, and remind you of why you’re even picking up the guitar in the first place. The more specific your goal is, the better.

Step 2: Break It Up into Bite-Size Milestones

Even one of these goals can seem pretty big and daunting, especially as a beginner. Learning that whole song isn’t always as easy as it seems and can often drag on for a while. When the goal seems far away, you’ll probably feel less inclined to take the first steps, so, there are two ways you can create quick wins and gain that sense that you’re making ground with your guitar playing.

Milestone goals:

By breaking your end goal into bite-size chunks, it automatically becomes a lot more achievable. For example, when it comes to learning a whole song, you might break this up into milestones such as: Learning the intro and verses, then playing the intro and verses at full speed with a metronome, then learning the chorus or the solo…

By approaching your goals in this way, the feeling of accomplishment as you complete each milestone will help keep you motivated towards your bigger goal.

The good news is, in Accelerator Guitar, I break down the milestones for you. There’s even a step-by-step song learning process you can follow, so you know you’re doing things in the right order.

Process goals:

Alternatively, you can focus on the process itself. For example, writers will often set a word count goal, and a time-based goal. For example, ‘I will stop after 1000 words or five hours, whichever comes first’.

For a guitarist, this might look more like this: ‘I will stop after I can play the verse chord sequence smoothly at 90 beats per minute, or after 20 minutes, whichever comes first.’

Your Practice Environment

Where do you keep your guitar? Is it in its case? If so, get it out! It might seem obvious, but something as simple as keeping your guitar somewhere that you’re likely to pick it up will encourage you to practise more often.

Dedicating a space for your guitar practise is always a good idea too. It’s not always possible to have an entire room just for your guitar and all its gear (the dream), but even if you can’t do that, perhaps you can allocate a certain space within a room in your house, or a certain chair or desk where you know that when you sit there, it’s guitar time and you can be solely focused on playing.

Digital space

So we’ve spoken about the physical space around you, but there are also changes you can make to your digital environment. The modern digital world is a distracting place and whilst there’s a lot to learn from it in terms of playing guitar, it’s often more of a hindrance than a help.

One easy thing you can do to avoid this kind of distraction is simply leave your phone or devices in another room, on ‘do not disturb’ whilst you’re practising – be in the moment and for the duration of your practice, be 100% dedicated and focused on the task at hand.

Personally, I’ve chosen to remove any social media, news, YouTube, and even the web browser from my phone – and I use an app blocker for the App Store, in case I’m tempted to re-install something. I’ve saved hours each day from just making this one change.

Be a Pro-Selector

For most people, they start playing guitar because they want to be able to play the songs of their favourite artists – it’s natural, you want to emulate your guitar heroes. But choosing the right song to learn is a key skill in learning the guitar and cementing your practice regime.

Obviously, if you pick something too hard (which you’ll quickly realise), you’re only going to knock your confidence, which in turn will put you off practising. Conversely, pick something too easy and you’ll find yourself getting bored very quickly. If you’re never finishing the songs you choose to learn, then this is a key indicator that you’re probably picking things which are too hard.

At the end of the day, choosing a song that is slightly too easy for you and learning to play it well is much better than picking something too hard and losing motivation.

Fix Your Practice

To help you put this into action, I’ve created this flow diagram, so you can quickly see where you’re at with your practice, and what you can do next. If you’re feeling stuck, asking yourself these questions should put you back on track.