Organizing Practice As You Learn To Play Guitar

One of the main problems I have found with students over the years is the organizational aspect when they learn to play guitar. In the beginning, it isn’t too difficult because there isn’t that much to work on. However, as you grow in proficiency and increase your repertoire, it becomes more important to have a game plan for growth and progress in organizing practice.

Keeping Your Technical Progress Moving Forward

I personally like to keep a journal of all my technical work. This allows me to quickly put down where I am from day to day without much effort at all. Typically I don’t need to write all of my exercises because practicing them every day keeps them in the forefront of my mind. But it is important for me to keep track of my progress when necessary. This usually includes metronome markings of each technical practice area.

You can see in the image from one of my old notebooks how my technical work went. From these snapshots, I can go back a year (or three in this case) and see how I have improved over time to give me a clear picture of my progress. For this specific record-keeping, I use a Moleskin notebook. I like it because it is lined and not dotted like others I use for Bullet Journaling.

Making You Repertoire Grow

When it comes to the repertoire, I create a simple spreadsheet to list every piece I am currently working on. I split them up into groups depending on where the pieces are in their progress. Currently, I have warm-up/technical pieces at the top. Then, all of my current repertoires are below the green line. The top piece is always the most recent piece and may not be ready for performance.

At the top of the sheet are the dates for the week (sorry it’s so small, click to enlarge). I usually create a new sheet for every week and a new file for every month. I am able to clearly see when I last worked on a piece of music by the checkmarks. This keeps everything in rotation so I can build long-term memory. You can also see that I take two days off every week. I am not at the studio on those days and I can never get any practice in on those days due to family time. Again, this spreadsheet goes all the way back to January of this year 2019. I show it to you rather than for my current schedule so you can see how easy it is for me to keep track of my progress.

Sight Reading Is Sorely Neglected

Finally, I work on sight reading. I don’t want to put a shameless advertisement for my book here but I will anyway. I wrote these exercises for my students and myself so I obviously find it useful in my own development (see the book here). I will also go back through the Bridges series from the Royal Conservatory to just pick a piece to sight-read. This allows me to play chordal groupings and work on rhythms in the context of an actual piece.

There you have it. Those are the three areas I focus on and have my students focus on in their practice routine. If you have any changes you would make, then feel free to include them in the comments. I know our readers would like to know what you do differently.

Check out some other posts:

• Beginning Fingerstyle Guitar Begins With The Thumb
• Organizing Practice As You Learn To Play Guitar
• New Thoughts On Memorizing Music (The Etude: Vol. 37, No. 10)
• The Efficient Music Teacher (The Musician: Vol. 21, No. 1)

Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, which can provide compensation to us at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. You can read my affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy.

Chadwick Becks

I have two degrees in guitar performance and was privileged to study under Aaron Shearer, Tom Kikta, David Skantar, Ken Karsh, Tim Bedner, and currently Christopher Berg. Outside my editorial work on this blog, I teach full-time across many genres including classical, jazz, blues, rock, funk, and metal.