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How to become more confident with your guitar playing

By April 10, 2019 No Comments

We’re always learning new concepts on the guitar, and it’s this sense of progression that keeps guitar fun, but how do you take new concepts that you’re learning and get to the stage where you can play those in front of others, and be completely confident that you’ll never mess it up?

The approach most people take is like hitting your head against a brick wall (practicing a lot), eventually you might break through the wall, or hurt your head in the process, but wouldn’t it be easier if we just build a ladder to climb over the brick wall (having a way to practice effectively)?

There’s a way you can achieve total confidence with anything on the guitar with less practice, let’s look at what it is!

Focus On Consistency

How you achieve this is to focus on ‘consistency’. Having great consistency is when you can do something on the guitar and get it right 9/10 times. Everytime. No matter what time of day it is and when you pick up the guitar.

What I would like you to do is to take anything technical that you play on the guitar and focus on playing it at a speed where you can do it correctly 9/10. How do you know what speed to go? Well the best thing you can use is a metronome to track your speed.

You may quickly notice that your ‘consistency speed’ is slower that what you normally play at and this is fine, and it’s to be expected. Over time, your consistency speed will improve just like anything else on the guitar.

Increasing difficulty to stretch yourself

Once you have been able to do this perfectly, 9/10. Try to increase the difficulty of the exercise.

This might be playing without looking at your hands, or with your eyes closed.

Play it watching yourself in the mirror.

Do it sitting down and standing up as well.

Do it without warm up and at the end of your practise.

Record yourself doing it on video.

Try it in front of people as well and maybe an audience.

Take a break for a few days and do it again.

All these little things will increase the difficulty of playing. Stretching your ability to achieve more on the guitar. Once you have lots of things you can do consistency and be able to play them one after another, this will really help you to feel more confident in your guitar playing.

Especially if you can do something really difficult for you consistently, it will inspire you to know that you can achieve the same consistency with other parts of your guitar playing too.

You want to keep finding new things to be able to do consistently to increase your confidence of your overall guitar playing.

 

About Author:

Guitar Tuition East London is a guitar school based in East London helping electric and acoustic guitar players to learn the guitar. Inspiring their guitar students to always challenge and push themselves so that they can achieve more on the guitar than ever before. Taking an innovative philosophy approach to teaching, their students quickly build confidence with their guitar playing.