In another post I talked about practising for just 15 minutes a day if that’s all the time you have, and I want to emphasise that I found this is a much better way to learn guitar than doing mammoth sessions at the weekend and resting for the rest of the week.

There is another thing I learned rather later than I wished I had, which is how to structure practice time so that it is (a) more beneficial and (b) more interesting. Early on in my guitar learning career I quickly found that 20 minutes a day was all I had time, or even the inclination, for. So I set up a structure to make the most of the time. In one session, for example, I would practice chords and make a note of those I was having trouble with. in another I would only practice the chords and chord changes I found difficult. I would set one session aside for just learning a song or two, and yet another for scales and arpeggios. In this way, in each session I was doing something different which not only kept my interest up, it also aided my concentration.

One other thing I learned to do was to have rest days. Never more than two in a row, I found that days without playing at all seemed to help my brain assimilate what I had been learning in the previous week and when I returned to the guitar it was often with a noticeable improvement in my playing ability. I use these rest days to brush up on my music theory and also to simply think my way through chords, changes and a few other exercises. It’s astonishing to me how valuable this is. I have found on several occasions that just by thinking my way through changes, when I return to the guitar once more I can make them with a great deal more ease than was previously the case. It’s not all about twanging and plucking.

photo credit: karpov the wrecked train

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