And how to get people to call YOU “gifted”

One thing that is often overlooked when discussing how to become a master of guitar is the fact that practice is a skill to master in its own right. 

You can certainly name a dozen or more guitarists who are so good that it’s easy to imagine they have a special innate ability that allows them to do things on the guitar that normal people just can’t do.  You may even have some “evidence” to back that up if you’ve tried learning their techniques and just felt that it would be impossible for you to ever reach that level.

But nothing could be further from the truth. 

All of those incredible players have one thing in common – they mastered practice.

Let’s take a look at some of the most crucial aspects of how players like Michael Angelo Batio, Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen (and even myself) have all achieved their level of playing…

1. Goals and Practice Plan

The majority of guitarists practice in a fairly haphazard way.  They have a vague idea of what they want to learn and they basically wing it.  That strategy can work for a little while, to a degree, especially at the beginning.  But it won’t take you very far and it’s a road that ends in frustration and helps solidify the illusion that you “just don’t have what it takes.”

Without clear goals and a game plan, you can never hope to truly master the guitar. 

First of all, it’s important to know what your overall goal is for practicing.  This could be something like: to be as good as a certain player, to be able to play whatever you feel on the guitar whenever you want, to be a professional guitarist, to be good enough to play a certain style with ease, to be the best, etc…

All of those goals are fine as long-term goals.  But if that’s all you have to work with, you almost certainly won’t achieve them. 

So, beyond having an “overall” or “final” goal on the guitar, you must break your goals down into a time-based hierarchy. 

If you have a goal that’s reasonable for you to reach in a few months, let’s say, then you can extrapolate from that and set weekly and then daily goals as you go.  

These goals can be broken down from something bigger like mastering a specific technique, to mastering specific exercises in a course that teaches that technique, to being able to play those exercises at a specific speed, all the way down to running those exercises X amount of times a day. 

You should set your daily goals each day based on your longer-term goals and on your progress.  You don’t want to create a situation where you’re rushing when needing to spend more time on something, nor do you want to arbitrarily hold yourself back.

** Every time you achieve one of your daily goals, it’s like laying a brick in the path to your overall goal.  Each of the weekly or monthly goals becomes a milestone on the way to your overall goal. **

Not only does this create a framework for your practice routine and strategy, but it also builds momentum exponentially over time.  

2. Optimal Practice Method

Once you’ve figured out your goal strategy, you’ll need a practice routine that will allow you to achieve them.  This is where Optimal Practice Method comes into play. 

The only way you will ever achieve the flawless technique of the guitarists I mentioned above is by using the metronome in an optimized way.  This method is all about the concept of “Perfect Practice makes Perfect.” 

However you practice something is how you’re training your brain and fingers to play it.  If you practice sloppy, your end result will be sloppy.  If you practice and allow mistakes, then your end result will have mistakes. 

** If you only practice “perfectly,” your end result will be perfect and people will think that YOU have that innate ability that allows you to play things “normal” people can’t. **

You’ve, no doubt, heard me talk about this on several occasions and you’ll likely hear it on many more.  That’s because, if you could only learn one thing from me, this would be the best one.

This method is simple, but requires patience and determination to use daily.  It will take you to absolute mastery on any technique, the same way this type of method has done for all the greatest players out there. 

Let’s say you’re working on a particular pattern.  The first thing to do is figure out what beats-per-minute (BPM) setting you can play it at, with perfect articulation and without making a single mistake. 

If there is no BPM that allows you to do that, you’re trying to play something too advanced for you at the time and it’s time to use this practice method on either sections of that pattern or fundamentals, such as basic alternate picking, before continuing.  

Once you find that BPM, you need to set the metronome even slower.  Then begin playing the pattern with the metronome at that new, slower speed, over and over again. 

When you reach 5 repetitions with perfect articulation and without making even the slightest mistake, you then set the metronome up by 2 BPM and repeat the process.  If you make a single mistake on any of those 5 repetitions, you must start the 5 over again. 

Each day you’ll find a limit where you can’t go any further.  That’s the time to mark down what BPM you’re at and stop metronome practice with that particular pattern for the day. 

On the following day, start 10 to 20 BPM slower then you ended on the day before.  Starting out, whatever speed you pick, it must be easy for you to play the pattern perfectly.  

Then, simply continue the process.  Do that until you can play the pattern perfectly at a higher BPM than is required.

If you want to get to a point where you can consistently play everything you want to, or need to, whether jamming or performing, you must overshoot and get your techniques faster than they need to be. 

** Never set yourself up to where you must play something at the limit of your guitar abilities.  You should only ever be reaching your limits when practicing. **

3. Maintenance Practice

While the above method will allow you to master any technique, it’s not enough to master the guitar. 

One of the most commonly overlooked aspect of mastery of any skill, is the importance of fundamentals and the foundation of what you know.

** If you spend all of your practice time working on something new, you don’t give a chance for the cement to dry on your foundation.  You end up with a rickety structure, with gaps and holes all throughout it. **

In short, you will lose what you don’t use.

A well rounded practice routine always contains the old and the new.  You must keep yourself fresh on what you already know and, in some way or another, maintain all the techniques that are important to your overall goal. 

This means setting up a practice routine that includes previous techniques or patterns from what you recently mastered, or maybe even coming up with an instrumental song that includes all the techniques you need to keep under your belt.  

You can incorporate a lot of this into daily warm-ups and you can even use improvisation sessions as a means to cover a lot of the bases. 

Now it’s true that, after awhile, it would be virtually impossible to practice everything that you’ve already learned every day.  So it’s important to be able to recognize the techniques that require maintenance vs. the ones that are covered by other aspects of your practice routine.

If you play with a band, jam with friends or record your own music often, a lot of this is taken care of automatically.  Which brings us to…

 4. Application

People have many different ways of learning, but there is one thing that is true for everyone: if you want to internalize and truly understand something that you learn, you MUST apply it. 

Practicing patterns with the metronome and getting perfect articulation at high speed will take your techniques to high places, but what good is that if you don’t know what to do with them?

This is something that gets overlooked more often than you’d think. 

Look at it this way: what’s the difference between a guitarist learning the techniques found in the music of a popular guitarist and that popular guitarist?  That popular guitarist used those techniques to write music. 

** When Michael Angelo Batio plays sweep picking or his unbelievably rock solid alternate picking shred technique on stage, he’s playing what he wrote and using those techniques for the very reason he spent so much time mastering and developing them.**

If you think you can reach MAB’s level of playing without writing your own music or solos, think again. 

Learning a song that utilizes a technique you’ve learned is type of application, but it doesn’t take the place of learning how to improvise or write a solo using the techniques that you’ve mastered. 

If you play with a band, I highly recommend incorporating new techniques into your guitar work in the band.  This makes it something that you’re not only applying, but that you need to keep in practice and play regularly.  

Nothing beats playing these techniques in the context of a killer song while on stage.  This is where it brings everything full circle and you begin to have an intuitive understanding of what the techniques are really for, when to use them, and what you can really do with them.

The more you write and improvise with these techniques, the more you understand the context of them within the guitar as a musical instrument.  

It’s difficult to put into words how important that is. 

Dan Mumm

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