How can I use my practice time more effectively? The way I practice right now makes me lose motivation and I know I can find better ways to practice but I struggle on how to go about it. Just a brief story about how I got to the point I am at now. I am a self taught guitar player with me first picking up guitar on my 12th birthday in 2019. I would watch guitar lessons on youtube and would just learn songs. At the time I hadn’t really understood that there was much more to it than that. As a result of that, I ended up getting bored of doing the same things and not really improving which would lead to less and less consistent practice and as expected it would turn in to months I would go without picking up the guitar. It would be large gaps of time like 3-4 months and then I would pick up my guitar, strum a little bit, play a few songs I had known and put it back down for another 3-4 months to repeat the process. I hardly remember myself playing it during quarantine when I actually had plenty of time to practice. About a year ago was when I tried to get serious about it and got myself to the point where I considered myself to be an “intermediate” player at the time. It then went back to that phase where I didn’t pick up the guitar for a while but these gaps of time were a bit smaller.
Now at 16 in January of this year, I had finally decided to seriously practice this time and I have picked up the guitar almost every single day. I aim to practice around an hour a day. Sometimes I end up playing longer. I would do a few exercises that would help out with the dexterity of my fingers and linear playing. I have been playing rocksmith which if any of you are familiar with is a game that you can use with your guitar and it just has songs tabbed out and you play along with the actual songs. I am really into metal and I play a lot of metal songs on there, I play most rhythms pretty well and I can manage high percentage on these songs. However, I cant say the same for the lead, I can play relatively simple to decently challenging solos but not the ones with fast shredding and stuff. I never really practiced any scales besides the f major which is definitely where my problem stems from. That’s about all I can do, I struggle with understanding them as I have very little music theory knowledge and don’t really know how to go about playing scales. I also would like to improve my technique as I believe that could be holding me back. I would really like to get myself to my ultimate goal of being able to play whatever I would like and also be able to improvise as well as play all scales and modes so I can write my own music. I know that with the way I “practice” right now that isn’t really helping and I would really just like advice on how to practice scales and tips that can help me use my practice time more effectively and create a consistent routine that can allow me to reach my goals instead of just jamming for an hour or 2. I appreciate any help in advance!
submitted by /u/Tactless95
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