Practising easily on a Guitar

Life is busy.
We all have slightly too many commitments and interests, and we all need some downtime too.As much as we may love the guitar, sometimes guitar practice can feel like hard work.Other times guitar practice seems easy and we wonder why we don’t always put in 8 hours a day.

Most of the time however, our feelings lie somewhere between these two extremes.
Whether we can put in a good practice session often depends on what other commitments you have, how much energy you have at that time, how much time you have before you have to do something else, etc.

You can’t always control these things but there are many other things that you can control in order to make guitar practice as easy as possible.

Practice easily through easy access

If you keep your guitar in a case or, even worse, in a case in a wardrobe, then you are creating a psychological barrier between you and your practice session.

It’s not that getting the guitar out requires any great effort, it’s that it requires action of ‘getting your guitar out’.This could be just enough to put you off on those days when practice seems like hard work.

If at all possible, have your guitar on a stand or hanger or even in the corner of the room; but one way or another, have it out and easily accessible.

This way it’s easy to pick it up and put in 20 minutes of guitar practice, maybe even when you weren’t intending to.

Practicing easily with your computer

If you use your computer in your practice sessions, to provide backing tracks say, have it permanently set up so you can just turn it on and go.

If you have to rearrange objects and plug in speakers or an audio interface; again you have another small barrier between you and your practice session.

Make your guitar practice sessions easier by having your computer set up so that all you need to do is wake it up in order to get cracking.

If you use tabs from tab website, consider getting an application like Guitar Pro which displays tabs beautifully, as oppose to using less accurate typed tablature.

Have shortcuts on your computer desktop to whatever files or backing tracks you usually use.

Practicing easily by switching off notifications

This obviously depends on whether you need to be contactable or not. But, if at all possible, I strongly recommend that you turn off ALL notifications.

This means your phone calls, your tablet, WhatsApp notifications, all email alerts, all social media notifications; absolutely everything.

With just a few unimportant interruptions along the way, a potential two-hour practice session can be shot to pieces.

The easier you make your guitar practice sessions, the easier it is to put in an extra ten minutes here and there. And the more appealing guitar practice in general becomes.

Hope you find this article helpful.