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If you’re new to the guitar, you might not see that you’re improving at first. One day you can feel your fingers hurting, the next day you sound a little better with a chord and the third day you feel like you’re back to square one. Because it doesn’t seem linear, we often judge how our practice is going based on how we feel instead of objective proof. If the hands feel slow, it seems like nothing is working. If one song fragment sounds better, it seems like a breakthrough. It’s best to look for signs of improvement in your practice time as small incremental changes, because guitar improvement often happens slowly in details without ever feeling like a big deal.
One indicator of improvement is you can stop making the same mistakes so frequently. For instance, a common stumbling point is that the G chord sounds all buzzed and that’s what you expect to hear. You practice the chord, but now it stops sounding buzzed half the time, or, you can go from the C major chord to an A minor chord more quickly. These aren’t trivial accomplishments, because they’re the foundation of real improvement. The problem is we often move to new material and new songs too early in the process, thinking that repeating the same things is a waste of time. But we need the ability to compare the current performance to past performances to really know if we’re improving or not, because if we can’t play those same old chord shapes, strumming patterns and small riffs well, we haven’t really gotten anywhere.
We need to come back to the same set of basic chord shapes over and over so we can judge progress. One of the best ways to measure progress is by listening to how well you can sound better. Do you hear your strings ringing longer than they did last week? Are you more consistent on your tempo? Are you able to correct yourself faster in your fretting hand? What we produce sounds a lot more important than what the music we’re practicing sounds like at a first glance. Try repeating the same short sequence three times to see if you notice that you’re playing that phrase more cleanly by the third time through. We often think we’ve wasted an entire practice session if we make a mistake once, but that’s not true. Improvement also happens in how quickly we recover from mistakes.
If we lose count in the middle of a section, but get back on tempo again with only a slight error without needing to stop and reset, this is evidence that we’re improving. We can also look at improvements by checking our performance from day to day to see if we’re doing better consistently, not just lucky breaks. Everyone gets lucky in their guitar practice sometimes and manages to hit a clean chord on the first try. The question is more if we’re able to hit that clean chord consistently. A good way to check in is a quick session where you spend a few minutes on one chord pair, one strumming pattern, and one small melody line on a single string. Keep checking to see if you’re getting any better at the chord change and one-string lick every five minutes.
Do you find yourself repeating the same mistakes? Then that means you don’t really know that chord yet, or do you find that there’s some progress in certain sections and not others? That’s a clue you are getting better at those sections. Taking this kind of inventory keeps us from feeling so frustrated that there’s a lot to do, and keeps us on track to keep working at the things that we really do need to keep working at. You can even build your daily guitar practice time to find your progress. Spend five minutes trying to nail down any area of playing that you’re really struggling with, a difficult chord change or a single-string lick you really can’t get clean, and spend five minutes playing that same thing but adding rhythm.
Then spend five minutes playing the whole thing with full attention without feeling pressured to get better or worse. If you find one small detail that sounded slightly better, keep playing that detail, or if you feel like nothing is better, then you should do less. Try slowing down the tempo even more to just two chords in a measure or practice a shorter two-string lick. Our guitar ability doesn’t grow linearly, which is why we often fail to notice that we’re making any progress in the first place.
Better timing, cleaner tone, smaller finger movement, quicker recovery, and steadier rhythm are all signs that the hands are learning their work. We just have to look for that evidence before it’s obvious to the eye. If we start noticing these small signs of progress in our playing, we stop worrying about if we’ll ever get there or not, and start asking what the heck was different about our fingers today to help us get better at that. That’s how we actually make progress on guitar and actually enjoy the process of improving ourselves.
