Are you feeling less motivation to practice guitar lately? Most likely if you have come to this page, you have felt frustrated more than once with slow progress during your guitar practice sessions. Fortunately, you are not the only guitarist who goes through this. Every guitar player (regardless of skill level or experience) struggles at one time or another when learning how to practice guitar effectively.

As a professional guitar teacher of many years, I have observed the guitar playing habits of thousands of guitarists. After teaching so many students, I have been able to clearly identify the exact reasons why guitar players lose motivation for practicing guitar. For the rest of this article, I will be discussing various ways that you can increase your motivation for guitar practice while learning to practice guitar more effectively. To help explain this, I have created a list of the top five reasons why most guitarists are not getting the most out of their guitar practice:

If you are unsure about what to you need to learn on guitar, it will eventually become difficult to maintain your motivation for guitar practice. To get more information on what to practice on guitar read the article on this page about realizing musical goals.

Reason No. 1: Not getting enjoyment from guitar practice.

Most guitarists have experienced a lot of frustration during their guitar practice. This has caused them to ‘resent’ the idea of practice because it reminds them of the frustration they faced. However, this negative mindset can be turned around if you understand how to consistently achieve progress during your guitar practice sessions. To do this, it is essential to integrate an effective guitar practice schedule with a fundamental enjoyment for learning guitar. As time goes on, you will begin treating guitar practice as an opportunity to improve on your instrument in order to play music the way you always wanted rather than as a mere obligation that you must complete each day.

Learn more about having more fun during guitar practice, read the advice in this effective guitar practice article.

Reason No. 2: Lacking focus of the big picture.

Becoming a truly great guitar player will take you years of hard work and dedication. The key element to becoming good at guitar is to understand your long term guitar playing goals. Once you have determined the things that you want to do with guitar, you can then begin to design your guitar practice schedule in a way that helps you to effectively reach these goals. To do that, think of your guitar practice sessions as individual pieces of a puzzle that make up the big picture of your musical goals. The better you understand the big picture of your guitar practice, the easier it will be to create effective guitar practice schedules. Additionally, as you begin to “put together the puzzle” and make progress you will become more motivated to practice guitar.

Reason No. 3: Losing motivation by having unrealistic expectations.

No matter how effectively you can practice guitar, you will not see huge results after only one or two practice sessions. Most guitarists choose guitar practice methods with the expectation that they will bring quick results with little effort. This decision usually results in the guitar player giving up on potentially effective practice methods too soon. As a result, these guitar players do not experience continuous progress in their guitar playing because they are switching practice methods too frequently. This approach to guitar practice is like reading ten different books and stopping a few pages into each one before you have time to understand the story. While practicing guitar, give each method time to work (or not work) before deciding to move on to something else.

Reason No. 4: Not knowing the ‘right things’ to practice.

It is very common for guitar players to use their practice time to try to learn as many new things on guitar as possible. Although this is normally done out of excitement for playing guitar, the truth is that these guitarists are unsure about what they should be practicing. As a result, they attempt to practice a wide variety of things on guitar in hopes that it will ‘lead them somewhere’. Ultimately, this approach fails because the guitarist does not have a clear set of goals to work toward. This causes him to feel great frustration when he doesn’t see any clear results. If you use this approach for an extended period of time, you will likely lose a great deal of motivation for guitar practice.

Reason No. 5: Not practicing guitar with an effective schedule

Many guitar players do not know how to schedule their practice in a way that brings them consistent results. In most cases, this is because they do not make a strong effort to find the most effective guitar practice methods. Instead, they create their own guitar practice routine and stick with it even if it is not helping them achieve the results they want. For example, most guitarists try to divide up practice time equally for every idea they want to practice. This approach consistently fails to bring big results in the long term because the guitarist is treating every practice item with equal importance. In reality, some of the things you practice will be more important than others and should take up more priority when you are scheduling guitar practice time.

In addition, many guitar players focus too much of their practice time on playing what they WANT instead of what they NEED. This causes them to make very slow improvement on guitar. By continually practicing guitar in this manner, you will struggle to apply your strong guitar playing skills due to weaker areas in your playing that hold you back. For example, many guitarists learn how to play fast scales or guitar licks, but never learn how to APPLY these ideas in musical situations. As a result, they cannot actually use their strong guitar speed skills in any practical sense such as improvising or writing cool guitar solos.

Use this guitar practice schedule assessment to get personalized feedback on how to effectively schedule your guitar practice.

What do you need to do next?

After reading the information in this article, you should have a better idea of why you lack motivation for guitar practice as well as how you can practice guitar more effectively. This article does not contain a complete list of all the challenges you may run into while practice guitar; however, if you apply the solutions in this article to your own guitar practice, you will begin to see better results in your guitar playing. Additionally, you will start to enjoy the learning process during each of your guitar practice sessions.

Author's Bio: 

About The Author:

Tom Hess is a successful guitar teacher, virtuoso musician and the guitar player in the epic power metal band Rhapsody Of Fire. He has taught online guitar lessons to guitar players in many countries around the world. Visit tomhess.net to watch an advanced guitar speed secrets video and watch many more video lessons on guitar.