My guitar teacher put it this way, “In performing, you want to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses…in practicing, you want to find your weaknesses, and work through them until they are no longer a weakness.”
He asked me to play some songs I had been working on, while he analyzed and pointed out my weaknesses. While at first putting me on the spot, I played some riffs I was practicing for him, and he noticed a few things:
1) My timing - Something I had told him was my weakness before playing. The thing was, my timing wasn’t off because I can’t keep a beat, but I was being timid with my picking hand. First of all, I had been using a hard pick to try and speed up my picking. The only trouble was I wasn’t being aggressive in my picking. In trying to minimize my picking movements, I had lost my timing and tone with the hard pick. He then handed me a .60mm Dunlop, which is like a sheet of paper compared to the Dunlop Jazz III’s I was using before. He then told me to exaggerate my picking movements and play as aggressively as possible while maintaining tone. When making more deliberate movements, my timing had actually improved. The thinner pick forced me to work harder, as well as being able to control the aggressiveness of my picking more than with the thicker pick.
2) Left hand speed - Something every guitarist wants to improve, as you always need to play just a little bit faster. There are many exercises which can help build left hand strength and speed, which I fully recommend. However, if you’re not doing them right, they can actually be more detrimental than good. I have a disease in my playing I like to refer to as “flying fingers”. Not flying as in really fast fingers, but flying as in the fingers that aren’t fretting a note like to “fly away” from the fretboard. This distance between the fingers not playing a note and the fretboard slows down my playing a lot more than I thought it did. Keeping the fingers close to the fretboard, even when they aren’t playing a note is something many guitarists need to focus on.
3) Practicing with distortion - Don’t. No cheating allowed when practicing scales and hard riffs. You’re giving yourself the illusion of playing it right when you might be sacrificing tone and accuracy. I have been guilty of this for quite some time, but playing everything clean helps me to see my mistakes and weaknesses as they really are. It is frustrating at first trying to get it perfect without any fancy effects to make you sound better. But this way if you practice to perfection clean, once you add the distortion and effects, you’ll be a much better player.
I challenge you to sit down and either record and critique yourself, or get someone else to analyze where your weaknesses might be, so you can really focus on practicing through - not around - your weaknesses.
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