Judging from the advice-seeking emails I get, many guitarists feel insecure about their current practice routine, thinking “There must be a better way!” I can’t tell anyone the “best” way to practice, but I do have some ideas about where the insecurity may come from, and some general advice for designing your own practice routine — a routine that will work for you and that you’ll stick to.

How contradictory advice messes with your head

If there’s one thing guaranteed to make you feel insecure about your guitar playing, it’s being confronted with wildly contradictory advice from killer guitar players whom you respect and and admire. Nowhere is this contradiction more striking than in the baffling variety of “Guitar Practice Secrets of the Stars” featured in contemporary performance-oriented guitar magazines. The vast discrepancy between the various approaches may be interesting to consider, but it also helps keep guitarists in a constant state of insecurity, thinking that “a better way” is lurking just out of reach. So they keep buying mags to find the secret path to guitar excellence — which I doubt the guitar mags are complaining about!

When it comes to putting in practice hours, you can roughly categorize the guitar gods into to three main schools of thought. Allow me to illustrate:

How much to practice? Three schools of thought

Low maintenance: In the low-maintenance, go-with-the-flow school you have Yngwie Malmsteen, who has repeatedly gone on record stating that he never practices. This immediately raises the question, “Well then, WTF counts as practice?” We can basically throw out the idea that “never practicing” is not an effective way to continually improve your guitar skills. All guitarists of any notable skill — including Mr. Malmsteen — have certainly spent some time engaging in activities that can reasonably be considered “practice.”

High maintenance: In the high-maintenance, play-till-your-fingers-bleed (and then some) school, you have Steve Vai, who recommends that players who are “intensely driven…to accomplish brilliant and historical acts on the instrument by discovering their unique abilities and talents” practice 10 hours a day (Guitar World, April 2004).

Advocates of grueling practice routines love to use words like dedication, intensity, drive, virtuosity, etc. The subtext is that if you aspire to be truly great, you must put in ungodly amounts of hours on your instrument — therein lies the dedication of the “true artists,” which separates them from the unwashed masses of wannabes who “don’t have what it takes.” Fair enough.

Sensible moderation: Steve Lukather, whom many (with good reason!) consider a true “guitarists’ guitarist,” advocates what I’d call the sensible, moderation-in-all-things school. He recounts striving to practice regularly about two hours a day, saying (in effect) that anyone who claims to practice a ridiculous amount of hours a day is either:

1. full of crap,
2. wasting time, or at worst
3. on the express train to burnout central, with stops in tendinitis city.

This sensible approach seems most likely to lead to success and continual progress for most guitarists. I have serious reservations about putting in extended hours of focused practice à la Steve Vai’s 30-hour guitar workout. Even truly stunning classical virtuosos (Itzhak Perlman, anyone?) don’t buy into the idea of marathon practice sessions. The key is regular, quality practice, not mere quantity. You’re not going to make much progress if practicing becomes a tedious chore — or if you have given yourself tendinitis.

Making sense of the senseless

With role models espousing such widely contradictory approaches, it’s no wonder that many guitarists spend so much time second-guessing themselves and searching for the perfect practice routine that will make the clouds part, angels sing, and provide a religious experience of instant guitar-skills gratification.

There is no perfect routine
Constantly judging yourself by what guitar heroes X, Y and Z do is the path to discouragement and despair. Rather than perpetually chasing someone else’s secrets, doesn’t it seem more fruitful to spend an hour or so defining your own personal goals as a guitarist, then devising your own “Secrets to effective practice” routine? Creating your own best routine can hardly be rocket science; you probably can’t go wrong with a routine that

• fits easily into your schedule (so you’ll actually do it),
• feels rewarding and enjoyable (so you’ll KEEP doing it),
• leads to steady, gradual progress in line with you outlined goals, and
• can be easily revised to adapt to your growth and development as a guitarist.

Next time you open a guitar mag, remember that they are profit-oriented just like any other commercial venture, and that their primary goal is to sell you more issues. Keeping you feeling insecure about yourself while at the same time offering you a (temporary) solution is a great way to keep you coming back from month to month. Guitar mags provide lots of useful information, particularly for beginning and intermediate players, but it’s a good idea to use your critical thinking skills when evaluating the practice routines that they present. (And of course, do the same with the anything I tell you!)

Finally, don’t worry about how much somebody else practices, or how long they’ve been playing, or any of the other things that boil down to comparing your own level of achievement to theirs to see how you measure up. Learning to evaluate yourself by your own standards rather than those embodied by other players or dictated by so-called experts could be a massively liberating experience for you. It sure has been for me!

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