How To Improve Your Guitar Playing Skills

Foto von Tony Rojas auf Unsplash

Learning to play the guitar takes dedication, patience, and great love for the instrument. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or a guitar master, you have to put a lot of time and effort into learning if you want to get better.

Developing and improving your guitar-playing skills isn’t something that will happen overnight. Ultimately, you won’t become a better guitarist if you don’t have the desire to learn.

Luckily, the fact you’ve landed on this post would suggest you do have the passion and desire needed to learn. If you do, you’ve come to the perfect place!

In this post, we’re going to show you 7 different things you can do to improve your guitar-playing skills. We’ll give you some hot tips and exercises you can use that will help develop your skills. 

If you like what you read, you can also check out the Six String Acoustic Guitar Website for more tips.

1. Dedicate Time To Practice

One of the best ways to get better at playing guitar is to dedicate time to practice. It can be easy to go days and weeks without practicing if you don’t have a routine. 

When it comes to improving your guitar playing skills, it is crucial that you put in time and effort to truly practice. Picking your guitar up now and again isn’t enough.

Instead, you need to dedicate specific times throughout the week when you’ll sit down and practice.

2. Record Yourself

A great way to see how you play, remember riffs you’ve written, and see how you perform is to record yourself. This is a wonderfully simple way to evaluate your guitar playing and remember where you held the guitar when performing a specific song.

Recording yourself is also a great motivator as it is a fantastic way to track improvements. You can watch each video back after six months to see how much you’ve improved.

3. Practice Your Technique Every Day

One way to improve your guitar playing skills is to work on a specific technique every day. Whether it be sweep picking, hammer-ons, or fingerpicking, practicing a technique every day will help you progress. 

It can be tedious to practice the same technique over and over again but the truth of the matter is practice does make perfect.

4. Play With Other People

Playing in a band setting is one of the best things you can do for your guitar playing. Whether it be with people you’ve only just met or friends you’ve been jamming with for years, practicing with others is incredibly beneficial.

Playing with others will teach you how to play different songs, how to complement other musicians, when to shine, and how to listen. 

Playing with others also gives you a great opportunity to learn from other guitarists and master your techniques.

5. Play A Style You’re Not Comfortable With

All the best guitarists can play a multitude of different styles and combine different genres to create something amazing. 

If you want to get better at playing different styles, the only way you can is by giving them a try. This will improve your ability to play different songs and different types of music. 

Changing your style is also a great way to stay motivated during practice because playing the same style all the time can get boring.

6. Take Some Time Off

It’s important to remember that there’s nothing wrong with taking a break every now and then. There will be times when you feel uninspired, demotivated, and downright fed up.

When you feel like this, simply taking a step back for a week or so can rekindle your passion and give you more motivation to learn. A break can also be a good opportunity to reflect on what you’ve learned. 

7. Practice Your Chord Changes

Being able to easily change chords is pivotal to any good guitar player. However, this is something a lot of people get wrong. 

A lot of guitar players struggle with the timing of their chord changes. Learning to coordinate the strumming hand with the chord changes is one of the toughest things to master but with practice, you’ll soon get it right.

Final Thoughts

There you have it, 7 ways you can improve your guitar playing skills. Every method or tip we’ve looked at for improving your skills as a guitar player can help you easily improve your overall guitar-playing ability.

However, it doesn’t matter what you do if you don’t have patience, determination, and the desire to practice on a daily and weekly basis. 

Now you have these tips, put them to good use and improve your guitar-playing skills.