How To Improve Your Guitar Playing By Avoiding Crippling Guitar Practice Habits

Like most guitarists, you probably spend a lot of time looking for things to practice that will improve your guitar playing.  Although this is certainly helpful and beneficial, there is one area that guitarists often overlook in the process of searching for effective guitar practicing tips.  In particular, there are several deadly guitar practice habits that many guitarists fall prey to that can severely (and needlessly) limit your guitar playing potential without you realizing it.  Finding out what these ineffective guitar practice habits are and how to prevent them will go a long way towards helping you learn to play guitar the way you want. 

Here are the top 3 most common guitar practice mistakes that you must be careful to avoid in your guitar playing and practicing:

“Random” Guitar Practicing
The worst (and the most common) bad habit to fall into when learning to play guitar is "practicing things at random", without any idea how the things you are working on will enable you to become the guitar player you want to be.  Having a specific goal in mind that you want to achieve is the most effective solution for this problem.  Searching for guitar practicing tips on improving your guitar playing without having any idea what you are working towards is similar to looking for driving directions to a destination that doesn't exist.  Learning to play guitar becomes much easier when you become clear on what it is that you want to achieve as a musician.  After you develop this clarity, searching for helpful guitar practice tips and moving towards reaching your "specific" musical goals will become much easier.  This one guitar practice tip is the most critical piece of advice for improving your guitar playing.

Learning To Play Guitar From Ineffective Sources
No guitar player will consciously do something to limit his guitar playing progress.  Because of this, most of the ineffective guitar practice habits are formed "unconsciously", as a direct result of following poor advice about guitar playing (or trying to teach yourself to learn to play guitar).  Because of this, it is important tocarefully select the sources from where you draw the information about improving your guitar playing.  Although there is a lot of free information available about playing guitar, there are millions of guitar players in the world who study these materials and still struggle to make progress with any of it. 

You can easily determine if the sources of your guitar playing knowledge are effective or not by observing how your guitar playing progresses over time.  If you struggle to improve your guitar playing and spend a lot of time searching for guitar practicing tips by consulting doubtful resources (such as most public online guitar forums for example), look for better ways to learn to play guitar and do not stop searching until you find one that produces the results you are looking for.  You can know right away if a particular source of guitar playing knowledge is ineffective when the advice is given by people who are not proven to be great guitar players or effective guitar teachers (this is why most online guitar forums are a dangerous place to turn to for advice on improving your guitar playing).  The same can be said about most online guitar courses that promise "instant results" or claim to be able to turn you into a great musician in an unrealistically short amount of time.  In contrast, a more credible source of guitar learning is one that can demonstrate "proof" of having successfully helped many other guitarists to overcome their frustrations and learn to play guitar well. 

Practicing Only The “Fun” Things On Guitar
When learning to play guitar, it is very tempting to practice only the music (or guitar exercises) that are fun and enjoyable.  Although this is one of the most intuitive things to do on the guitar, it is a highly unproductive use of your guitar "practice" time.  There is nothing wrong with playing guitar for fun, but when "all" of your guitar practice time is spent in this way (with little or no time left for serious practicing), the rate of your musical progress will be extremely slow.  It is possible to overcome this bad guitar practicing habit and improve your guitar playing, while still leaving time for enjoying the act of playing music.  To do this, what you need is to divide up your total available time during the day to play guitar into 2 parts: Guitar Practicing Time and Guitar Playing Time.  Set aside specific amount of time to work on improving your guitar playing by practicing to overcome specific challenges in your musical skills.  After doing that, you will be able to enjoy the process of playing your instrument for fun much more. 

If any of these common guitar learning mistakes apply to you, taking action to break these bad habits will go a long way towards making all of your efforts to improve your guitar playing become much more effective.  Doing this will enable you to become the guitar player you want to be a lot faster than you have previously imagined.