To STOP Or To KEEP GOING: How Should You Practice Guitar?
What’s the better guitar practice strategy?
practicing by playing songs or exercises all the way through to the end without stopping,
or practicing by stopping and fixing your mistakes every time they happen?
Many might say that if you always play songs all the way through without stopping, you won't be able to fix your mistakes or reach the point where you can play super clean and flawlessly.
Others would say that if you always go back and fix your mistakes, you won't train the ability to play straight through songs without worrying about mistakes, which is a much better strategy for live performances.
Who is right?
Think about it for a minute before I give you the solution...
...
...
As crazy as this might sound, both of these points are actually completely right.
"Both points are right?? How can this be? Every argument needs to have one clear right and wrong, so long as I am in the right and the other person is wrong!"
Surprisingly enough, this incredibly common viewpoint is actually not true, and sometimese both sides of an argument can bring up equally valid points!
So if both sides are right, what is the best way to practice?
Is the best method to simply not practice at all, and argue with strangers on the internet instead?
Nope! It’s something else entirely.
If you want to know the real best way to practice the guitar (or any other instrument, for that matter), watch the video linked below where I explain the optimal way to go about practicing.
Want something new to start working on that will make the most difference in your guitar abilities with the minimum of practicing? Check out my Master of the Modes guitar course, if you want to massively expand your knowledge of scales and modes on the electric guitar!
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet, so nice to see you. The other day, a student of mine asked me a question. And I think this is one of the most important questions you can ask, actually. So I need to do a video on that, because I need to comment on that.
The question was, if I am practicing my guitar, or in general any instrument, but if I'm practicing my guitar, and I make a mistake, should I stop, fix the mistake, or should I just keep going? Think about it for a moment.
Before you hear my answer, think about it for a moment. If you are practicing your guitar and you make a mistake, should you stop, replay the exercise, and make sure it's correct? Or you should just keep going?
And make sure that your answer is your answer, and not what you've heard around on YouTube. Really think about it for a moment. It's important. You see, I love questions like that. Because this question is a question that most people think it has an obvious answer, right?
But it doesn't. The answer is absolutely not obvious, as you're going to see in a moment. Okay? It takes courage to ask this question, because you have to admit it that you don't know the answer. Do you know the answer?
It's perfectly okay to admit it that you don't know the answer. Okay? And see, that's the thing. I've noticed one thing, is that this question is fairly obvious to good players, to professional players.
Maybe if you ask them, they're not going to give you immediately the answer. Because when great players talk about their playing, that's often not actually thinking about their playing, they're thinking about what they should tell you so that you don't get into trouble, okay?
Or what they should tell the user that you understand. But in their practice, professional players do this, okay? So, and in this question, as to the level of an answer, so let's see the first level.
The first level is this. And you know what? Let's put everything on the board so you see exactly what's going on. If you make a mistake, should you? Ooh, that's after the board. Should you? Stop and fix.
Or just keep going. The first level is this. If you do only stop and fix, you will fix your technique. But the moment you go and play live and you make a mistake, you will have an ingrain habit. of stopping and that would be really hard to overcome when you're playing live or even playing in studio okay and you've seen those people they make a mistake and they freeze.
Okay so if you do only if you do stop and fix you have this problem on the other hand if you just keep going what's going to happen is that you are practicing something you make a mistake on a specific point of the exercise you keep going and then the next time you keep going the next time you keep going and you never fix that mistake.
The first level of the answer is you should do both you should do both okay does it feel like a trick answer it's not you should do both because neither of those things by themselves are enough to give you the result you want because the result you want it's correct technique and fluidity when you're playing live or in studio these will give you correct techniques this will give you fluidity keep going but it doesn't give you correct technique this gives you correct technique because you fix it but it doesn't give you fluidity which means you need to do both.
That's the first level of an answer okay but is there more oh boy yes there is because that's where the second part the second level of the answer arrives which again it's fairly obvious to most professional most great player even if some of them most of them actually will not come up with the answer themselves.
But when they hear it okay they're like yes definitely it's that which is this it's the way you practice depends on what you are practicing for you don't practice in abstract you don't sit down with your guitar and say oh i want to practice this exercise.
You don't do that. You're practicing for something, okay? The same exercise is practiced in a completely different way, depending if you are practicing this, too. Eliminate a bad habit in your technique, or strengthening the good habit in your technique, or you are learning this part of a solo because you want to play it in studio or live, or many other situations, okay?
And so you need to know what you're doing and why you're doing it so that you can practice it correctly, okay? It is absolutely important, okay? So here's how it goes. If you are practicing, if you are learning an exercise, Okay, so if maybe it's the first time you play the whole thing, or you don't have the exercise down yet, or because you're still trying to memorize the center, if or if you're working on accuracy.
Or if you're working on relaxation, for instance, okay, or all those kind of things, if you're working on your technique, you want to stop and fix. Okay. But if you are practicing for a live situation, or for a playing situation, if you are accelerating, for instance, meaning you're pushing for speed, okay, which there are ways and other ways, but this is a very high -level review.
The details are slightly more complicated than that, but if you are accelerating pushing for speed, or if you are stress -testing your technique, you want to see how fast you are so that you can see at what speed you have to practice and all this kind of thing, you want to keep going.
Okay. You have heard on YouTube, or on any other article that you read online about guitar, that you are supposed to learn everything slowly and relaxed all the time, and then gradually accelerate until you get to the speed you want.
That's not true. People who give you this advice, unqualified without telling you when it works and when it doesn't, they don't know how to explain that. I'm sorry about that. That's the way it is. Because it's like saying you always want to stop and fix the technique.
Whenever you make a mistake, stop and fix it. It's good in some specific situation. It's not good for other situations. and definitely it's not good if you are practicing to play something live. Because, guess what, when you're playing something live, if you make a mistake, you need to keep going, okay?
Again, the same is true for pushing for speed. Yes, sometimes you want to play everything slowly and relax and then gradually increase the speed, and on the other hand, occasionally you do want to play something much faster than you can actually play it, just to push up the physical speed of your fingers, okay?
Now, if you want to have all the details about that, I would recommend you guys check out my friend Mike Filippov's website. His website is called practiceguitarnow.com, okay? Mike explains this stuff with a wonderful abundance of details, okay?
He has a YouTube channel too, I'm going to link it in the description. You want to see all his videos. because Mike will tell you exactly when one thing is right, when the other is not right, and Mike has no problem giving you the contrarian vision to whatever else is on YouTube, because he doesn't care about being contrarian, he cares about giving you the right thing.
But that's the idea. It's not either or. Both practices are correct, as long as you know why you're doing them. And again, this is true of a number of other things in music. It's true even in theory.
It's true when you learn theory. It's true when you compose something. It's like, do I compose by listening to my heart and the emotion or use theory? Both. Okay. You get an inspiration and you use theory to take the result of that inspiration better.
And then you use theory to create another inspiration, because you can't do that. There is no such dichotomy. When people tell you, do I compose by theory? Do I compose from my heart? There is no difference.
It's like asking, do you prefer to walk with your right leg or with your left leg? Come on, guys. Two things you do. There's not one thing or the other, and that's it. Those two things you can do, and they are useful in different moments.
And typically one after the other, after the other, after the other, after the other. Okay. So let's not limit ourselves. Make sense? So that's the answer to that question. This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com, and until next time, enjoy!
And until next time, enjoy.