Wish you could get better at guitar a lot faster? One of the most frustrating situations for any guitarist is being stuck. This kind of frustration often kills the motivation guitarists have to practice and improve. If you aren’t making progress on guitar as fast as you want, it’s crucial that you learn what to do so you don’t have to remain frustrated.

Here are several approaches that are useful for helping you make faster progress and achieve musical goals:

Stop overwhelming yourself with too many practice items

Whenever guitar players begin overwhelming themselves with too many practice items, it’s a sign that they don’t know what they should be practicing. This overwhelming feeling often causes great frustration and makes the idea of practicing feel like a chore because you don’t know where to get started. In the end, many guitar players quit playing altogether due to this. Don’t let this happen to you.

Focus on creating specific musical goals that you can reach over a short, medium and long period of time. Be as specific as possible and make these goals tangible. Once you have these things in place, it becomes easier to decide which items you should be practicing to reach them. This gives you a clear vision of how to make your practice schedule so you can be as productive as possible. For more help with this (in case you aren’t sure what to practice), find an experienced guitar teacher who will help you.

Focus closely during practice time

When you lose focus during guitar practice, it becomes time wasted.

Guitar teacher and music career trainer, Tom Hess offers his advice: “It is a mistake to think simply going through the motions of playing scales or noodling around will help you become a much better player. Your practice time needs to be reserved for 100% serious and focused effort. One way many guitarists lose focus is by practicing hours at a time. It is nearly impossible to stay focused on what you are doing for this long. Break up your practice into smaller chunks of 15-30 minutes and work with intense focus during this time. You will see much better results this way.”

Practice integrating concepts together

A lot of guitar players limit themselves by practicing everything in total isolation from everything else. Fact is, you make much faster progress and become a better overall guitarist by integrating different skills together during your practice. Imagine if you wanted to become a great lead guitar player, but you never learned how to phrase a solo, improvise and memorize the fretboard… this would make playing great solos extremely difficult. Yet, so many guitarists make this mistake and focus only on practicing building speed. This creates a massive imbalance in their playing that keeps them from being able to reach their goal of playing great lead solos.

Jacob Melling, guitar teacher and owner of American Academy Of Guitar Mastery suggests all guitarists practice integration: “Sometimes you do need to practice things in isolation in order to get down fundamental movements. Beyond this point, you benefit the most from integrating your skills together and learning how to apply what you know in new and interesting ways. This helps you get better faster and improves your ability to be creative.”

Follow the main ideas of this article and start making faster progress than you ever thought possible!