Practice Sessions

Hi,

I’m trying to figure out how to structure my practice sessions; right now I’m working on simple chords, a few scales and some song exercises. Any advice on how long to spend on each or what to focus on? I try to do 30 minutes-1 hour of practice a day. Thanks!

Hey & welcome!

A typical 1 hour long practice session might look like this:

5-10 minutes:  Stretch, warm up hands doing simple scales/melodies, or strumming basic chords.

20 minutes:  Play through material you can already do pretty well.  The idea here is just to get your fingers, ear & mind working on music.  But since you are playing something you can already do, it's more about fun & reinforcing your muscle memory on current repertoire.  You can refine skills, workout rough edges.

20 minutes:  Work on something new & difficult for you.  This is when you are trying to play new material from whatever tutorial you are currently working on.  This is not as fun & might be hard or frustrating.  But it's necessary to go through new material that challenges you.  Go slowly, be patient with yourself.

10 minutes:  Return to something you can already do pretty well.  The idea here is just to finish with something that is fun again.  Something that will give some satisfaction like a reward for getting through the hard part.  Hopefully this will finish your practice session on a good note!  You will be encouraged about your skills & motivated to schedule your next session.

This list can be adjusted for just about any material.  It can also be scaled up or down with a different amount of time to work with.  Warm up, fun, work, fun.

As a beginner, sometimes you don't have a lot of material to work with.  But this is where sheer repetition can fill in the time.  And focused repetition is exactly what you need to learn guitar.

Hope that helps!