Keeping your guitar learning fresh

Next time you sit down to do some guitar practice are you going to launch into a continuation of what you were doing yesterday or are you going to make today’s guitar practice fresh?
One of the difficulties with daily guitar practice is that we tend to want to continue yesterday’s playing from where we left off. Trouble is, we aren’t warmed up like we were yesterday so our muscles can’t do what they were doing last time we held the guitar. Have you read anything about muscle memory yet? Basically, we need to leave the work of playing the guitar to the intelligence of our muscles. If we practice in a relaxed manner, we encourage our muscles to assume good habits. If we are in a hurry to learn a riff or get the tedious scale practice out of the way, our muscles will habitually think we are in a hurry every time we pick up the guitar.
So reading a little on the theory of muscle memory will help us learn the guitar faster than rushing our practice, but how does all this keep our guitar practice from getting stale? Well, the best way to remind ourselves to practice intelligently is to have some new piece or song up our sleeves which will MAKE us slow down and make the intelligence of our bodies open up to get something new. We need to plan ahead - have a printed tab or sheet music book handy or have some new song in your bookmarks on your computer.
Generally speaking, a song is probably better than a scale or instrumental piece. You can fool around with a song; see how the chords sound when you play them in different combinations, make a solo out of the melody line. Have fun with it but at the same time remember that your doing this to challenge yourself.
About ten minutes minimum is good, bearing in mind you’ve got other ongoing practice to do.
Browse this Guitar tab page to get some ideas, or find out how you can get your online guitar teacher to teach you your favorite song!

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