1 Tip to Massively improve your Guitar Practise! – Find mistakes and improve!

So what is the tip? Play unplugged! Unplug the guitar from your amp. This one tip will massively improve your guitar practise. As guitarists, we tend to get lost in effects like distortion and reverb or even backing tracks. What these do is act as a mask and make it hard to find your mistakes. With all the effects on your guitar, to your ear it seems correct, however, try stripping away the effects, stopping the backing track, in fact, switch off your amp and unplug your guitar entirely. Doing so will allow you to hear your mistakes, allow you to hear any imperfection In your playing. You will be able to correct these quickly, then when you plug back in you know you will be hitting every note correctly! This will dramatically improve your guitar practise, making it easier to understand what you need to work on.

What happens is if you are playing something incorrectly (as we all do) and don’t correct it, muscle memory builds up and then you will find it harder to correct that mistake. Removing all effects and hearing the guitar as clean as possible will help you spot mistakes and improve them. Combine this with slowing the phrase down, and we mean right down, will help you play it correctly.  

Out of all the guitar practise tools I have seen online, I find this one the most useful and make sure I start my guitar practise routine with it. It is very rarely spoken about but can be an amazing guitar tool. It’s free and requires no equipment or set up. Remember we aren’t saying that you can’t play with distortion or reverb, but before switching your amp on, just play through the phrase un-amplified, listen carefully to any mistakes you might perform.