I’ve been playing guitar since 1996 and I’ve been teaching people to play the guitar since 2005. In that time, I’ve encountered a lot of different approaches to practice both in my own playing and in the playing of my students.

Needless to say, I’ve encountered a lot of common practice mistakes over the years – I’ve made a lot of them myself! I’ve also learned from these mistakes, and it’s the lessons I’ve learned from my experience that I’d like to share today.

Avoid the following common practice mistakes to supercharge your practice efficiency.

One of the most common practice mistakes is to play too fast. Playing a piece quickly might be the end goal, but if there is still a lot of work to be done on mastering the notes, then playing fast should wait. Before you can play quickly, you should have complete mastery over the notes at a slow tempo.

If you can play at a slow tempo and you feel in control, then you can begin to speed up your tempo. If you maintain control at all stages while increasing the tempo, your playing will always feel effortless.

I see this one a lot during lessons! Practice is an active process, and it requires your full attention. If you find yourself mindlessly running through your pieces, you are no longer engaged in practice, you are simply playing what you already know (be it good or bad!).

If you find yourself doing this, try setting a clearly defined goal at the beginning of your practice session. This will help to keep your mind focused. Whenever you notice yourself drifting away from your goal, stop and refocus your mind on what you’re trying to achieve.

Another favourite of mine! We’re all familiar with the phrase “Practice makes perfect”. This is often wrongly interpreted as “repeat until perfect”. The problem is, if you repeat something a set of movements that are imperfect, these imperfect movements will start to become embedded in your muscle memory. Repetition does not make perfect, it makes consistent.

Before repeating a set of movements or passage of music, ensure you have the movements correct. It should feel comfortable and you should understand all of the little details that make up these movements. The more disciplined you are with yourself at this stage, the better. Only when the passage of music is fully under your control should you begin to repeat and embed in your muscle memory.

This is the other side of the coin to repeating too early – not repeating enough! Confused? Let me explain. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about repetition. It’s an essential practice method, but one that must be used correctly. Once you’ve successfully worked out how to play something, you should then repeat it. If you move on too soon you risk forgetting how to play the section and will be forced to learn the same thing again and again until your brain has enough experience of playing the passage to commit it to memory.

It’s essential that you embed newly learned passages of music by repeating them. A former teacher once told me a story about Agustin Barrios, who would supposedly sit on a wall outside his house with 10 stones. If he played a passage of music correctly, he would move one stone to his other side. He would do this until all 10 stones had been moved. However, if he made a mistake, he would move all stones to their original position and start again.

The practice room is like your sandbox. It’s your environment to explore and play with music. The practice room is not a mundane place where all you do is repeat the same thing until you’re sick of the sound of it! You should be open to new ways of playing, new positions for your hands and new movements for your fingers. If you’re learning a fresh piece of music, you should be questioning the best approach to tackle it. Feel free to try out multiple fingerings with both left and right hands. Don’t settle too soon.

You will learn something about the way your fingers work if you explore your music in these ways. Not everything you try will work out, and that’s perfectly ok. You’ll still learn something about how your hands operate and you can use this knowledge going forwards, forming a broader understanding of your relationship with the guitar.

Superficial learning is another common practice mistake. This is where we learn just enough about the piece to get by in practice. This leads us to believe we’ve learned the piece fully. The problem with superficial learning is that it takes very little to expose the player. Have you ever learned a piece of music and had it sounding great in practice, only to fall to pieces when performing? I think we’ve all got a story like that somewhere in our history.

Before completing a piece, you should test your knowledge to make sure you are robust enough in your understanding of the music to be able to perform successfully. Here are a few examples of how you can test yourself:

1. Say/sing the names of the melody notes as you play.
2. Select a bar at random and begin playing from there.
3. Play just the melody/harmony/bass on it’s own without the other parts.
4. Play the melody/bass from memory while singing it.

These are just a few examples, I’m sure you can think of plenty more along these lines you can use to put yourself to the test. If not, you can find over 100 such exercises in our Practice Hacker Playbook. Those looking for a comprehensive practice plan should check out our Practice Model.

Better yet, get both practice resources mentioned above AND a complimentary practice toolkit with with a whopping 85% discount in our Ultimate Practice Bundle.