Practice

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Guitar Lessons in Lincoln and Newark will teach you how to use regular practice to improve your learning.

The shaded area of the graph shows that we typically forget 80% of new information within the first twenty-four hours of a lesson. But when students practise, they review the material that was learnt and this 'tops up' the memory. Regularly reviewing material improves the overall recall as time progresses. Alternatively, if you do not use what you have learned, you will start to lose it.

Practice should be a regular part of your daily routine. Times that seem to be successful include before work/school or as soon as you get home.

Don't push very young children into long practice sessions - five or ten minutes will probably be enough. If your child already has a good attention span - fine.

It helps if you listen to them and encourage them as they practise, especially with younger children

Encourage your child to practise slowly and to take difficult passages apart to try and find out what the difficulty is. Things don't get better by just playing the music over and over again with the same errors.

Help your child with a practice plan to include:
- Warming-up with technical exercises
- Sight-reading earlier, easier pieces and the last song that they have practised
- Any new material they have been assigned - they should try to master any challenging parts first
- Encourage them to end with a piece that they have finished and enjoy playing

Practicing every day is ideal. Skipping a day occasionally won't hurt and may even be necessary to rest your muscles and keep you fresh and excited about playing. But you should know that after skipping a day, you will usually start out the next day further behind than you were on the day before you skipped. Skipping a day often (say, more than once a week) will make it difficult for you to make progress, because you will keep losing the progress you have already made. If you don't have time, just doing your warm-ups or sight-reading is better than skipping a day.

Young musicians and other beginners do not need long practices to make progress. A ten-year-old beginning, for example, may only need practices of fifteen or twenty minutes. But the better you get, the longer your practices will have to be if you want to keep progressing. A sixteen-year-old who has been playing for more than ten years may need to practice more than an hour a day to make further progress. Professionals practice several hours a day.

Some tips for improving as fast as possible:

Don't practice it wrong! Don't play wrong notes, leave notes out, or play wrong rhythms. This just teaches you to play it wrong. If it's too difficult to play right, slow it down enough that you can play all the notes in rhythm, correctly, no matter how slow this is. When you can play it correctly slowly, start speeding it up, but never practice it at a speed that you can't handle. This is the fastest way to perfect a piece.
Don't just play through your music. Skip the easy parts; they're easy! Find the hard parts, slow them down, and practice them until you can play them correctly at the right speed.
If there's something you just can't play at all (like a bar chord), make it part of your warm-up. Find an exercise that makes it easier to get to that bar and do it every day the easy way. Eventually it will start improving in the harder music, too.

Just turning up to a lesson won't be enough. It's what you do between the lessons that will make you an outstanding player.