Avoid 10 Common Guitar Mistakes For Better Playing

10 Common Guitar Mistakes To Avoid For Better Playing

Learning to play guitar is similar to learning many other art forms like martial arts, visual arts, and dance. It is very easy to unknowingly develop bad habits, and unless they are dealt with early on in your guitar playing life, they can be hard to break.

Here are some of the most common guitar mistakes that many beginner players make.

Using too much effort to play

In my experience, the most common guitar mistake beginners make is putting in too much effort. It’s not just with guitar players either; musicians who play other instruments also encounter this same problem.
I believe it’s especially common in beginner guitar players because some believe that pressing down on the strings and the act of playing guitar should be physically strenuous.
If you have that belief, remove it out of your mind now!
The truth is, the physical action of playing guitar should feel relatively easy. I don’t mean that it’s easy to play scales, improvise, or play groovy rhythms; I mean the physical act of placing your fingers on the strings and strumming the strings should not feel like a workout at the gym.
The main issue usually lies with finger positioning.
One key thing to remember is that whenever you play any note on the guitar, you need to place your fingers near the fretwire towards the guitar’s body. Don’t actually press down right above the fretwire, but just slightly behind it. This is the point that requires the least pressure to produce a nice and clean note.
Try it out yourself.
Play the note on the third fret, and move your finger around on that fret. You’ll notice that the string buzzes a lot more as you get further away from the fretwire that is closer to the guitar’s body.
The same idea applies to playing chords. Most people have difficulty with the barre chords, and their initial reaction is to press a little harder. Before you know it, your wrist and your thumb start to hurt.

Instead of using more pressure, try adjusting your finger positioning while maintaining a light and effortless touch.

Not getting a professional guitar setup

Much of this section is relevant to the previous section because getting a professional setup very often results in an instrument that is easier to play and requires a lot less effort to get good sounding notes.
I’ll admit;
I had been playing guitar for about five years before I even knew what a professional guitar setup was!
For those first five years I thought that playing the guitar was supposed to hurt my fingers, and it’s normal to get tired after playing for only a couple of minutes. My improvements were slow because I’d often get tired quickly and had difficulty practicing more than half an hour at a time.
As you may know, more practice time clearly means faster improvement.
This all changed when I finally got my guitar set up by a professional. The difference was like night and day; my guitar was suddenly so easy to play, and I could play for two hours straight without stopping. (I don’t recommend that though.)
The main thing that a professional guitar setup achieves is a much lower string action.
The string action is the distance between the strings and the fretboard. This obviously affects how much pressure you need to press down on the strings, and even fractions of a millimeter can be felt by the hands.
Very often, brand new guitars, especially lower-end models, have high string actions. Even if the guitar was set up at the factory before being shipped out to the shop, most of the time, the string action changes during shipment.
The reason is very simple - a guitar’s setup is easily affected by environmental conditions like heat and humidity. Your guitar may leave an American factory with the best setup in the world, but if it ends up in London, where the climate is dramatically different, the setup is going to change.

It is possible to set up your guitar yourself, but I’d definitely suggest bringing it to a professional for its very first setup. Most places allow you to stay and watch as your guitar is being worked on, so you may learn a thing or two!

Going too fast

Another very common beginner guitar mistake. Trying to play a song at 100% after you’ve learned where the right notes are will often lead to developing very bad habits.
Fight the urge to play the song at 100% of its speed, and instead try going at 50% first.
At slower speeds, you’re much more capable of focusing and making sure your technique is on point, rather than just blasting off at full speed with sloppy technique.
A very important thing to remember is practice makes things permanent.
If you practice sloppy technique, you’re going to permanently have sloppy technique. Perfect practice is what gets a perfect technique.

Obviously when I say “perfect” I don’t mean 100% perfect, as we’re still human beings and we will definitely make mistakes, but practicing with such a mentality will get you much better results.

Practicing without a metronome

In the previous section, we talked about slowing down. This is where the metronome comes into play. The metronome is easily the most important practice tool you’ll ever have, and it may be the only practice tool (besides your guitar) that you’ll ever need.
The metronome mainly helps with three things:

• forcing you to slow down while practicing
• giving you a clear idea of your progress while practicing
• building a natural sense of rhythm within you

It’s easy to tell you to practice at a much slower pace, but most people’s tendency is to start practicing a song slowly and then unknowingly speed up to the point where you’re more or less going at 100% towards the end of the song.
A metronome counters that by giving you a clear indicator to follow; if you speed up or slow down, the metronome will let you know.
The metronome also clearly indicates whether you’re improving or not. Without it, you’ll just be practicing the same song over and over again, without knowing whether you’re actually playing it faster and cleaner or not.
With the metronome, your progress can be tracked by the speed at which the metronome is going. Since you can also increase the speed gradually with the metronome, you’ll also be forced to focus on the cleanliness of your playing.
Finally, the metronome teaches you a sense of rhythm that is so important when it comes to playing music. I’m convinced that rhythm is so much more important than harmony and melody, because, without a good rhythm section, a band usually crumbles.
As a guitarist, if you miss a bar or two of notes, it’s usually okay as long as your drummer keeps his/her composure.
Most people won’t even notice it!

However, if your drummer misses a bar or two, it is painfully obvious to everyone in the room. Additionally, musicians with a good sense of rhythm are generally much more fun to play with because it’s easier to lock into their grooves.

Practicing with too many effects

I know it sounds great to play with your reverb and delay pedals turned on and set to max, but these effects cover up mistakes and sloppy technique. The same can be said about heavy distortion effects.
I don’t mean to say that you shouldn’t practice with these effects turned on; on the contrary, you should do it often! But you don’t want to practice with them turned on all the time.
Split your practice session into 50% with effects turned on, and the other 50% with effects turned off. This way, you will be able to evaluate your technique without a wash of sounds covering up your mistakes.

The same idea applies if you like to roll off the tone knob on your guitar. A nice warm and rounded tone sounds great, but it also covers up many mistakes. Occasionally turn your tone knob all the way up, and also the treble knob on your amp.

Inconsistent practice

A lot of playing music comes down to muscle memory. For playing music and many other activities that require complex motor skills, the best way to make these movements feel effortless and automatic is through consistent repetitions.

It is much better to practice for 15 minutes every day than to practice 10 hours one day a week. The key to muscle memory is really consistency! It’s the same reason why soldiers do the same drills everyday for months at a time.

Not learning music theory

This is an odd one, but many beginner guitar players make this mistake. People tell me that they avoid learning music theory because they’re afraid that it’d affect how they sound and they’d start playing in a much more “technical” manner.
The truth is, most people avoid picking up music theory because some of the concepts can be rather difficult or boring, and it’s difficult to find the patience to sit down and attempt to understand these concepts.
Afterall, it’s a lot more fun to be playing music than reading about music.
No doubt, learning music theory can be time consuming, and sometimes very frustrating, but learning music theory can very often expedite your understanding of music.
The point of music theory is to explain how and why certain chords or notes sound good with other notes. Without it, you’d be simply memorizing chord progressions and scale shapes.
Think of it this way, was there a mathematical or scientific formula you were forced to memorize in school?
How much easier was it to remember the formula when you actually understood the concept, in comparison to just blindly memorizing it? It is always much easier to remember things that you understand than just formulas.

Another good analogy is language. Music is a language, and if you simply just memorize words and sentences, rather than understand basic sentence construction, you’re not going to be able to express your thoughts and ideas coherently; you’ll really only be able to regurgitate things that you’ve heard other people say.

Trying to learn too much at once

Here’s another mistake that many beginner guitar players are guilty of. It happens especially with my students who are highly motivated and very willing to learn.
In no way am I saying that being highly motivated is a bad thing, but problems arise when many of us decide to move on to something else before we’ve even mastered the song we were previously working on.
Learning all your scale shapes and all the modes in 12 keys is a great objective, and eventually, if you’re hardworking and disciplined enough, you will be able to learn them all. But it is better to get really good at one or two things than to be mediocre at a hundred things.

Bruce Lee once said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”Very relevant to playing music.

Limiting your musical tastes

This is a mistake that I’ve been guilty of, and it’s embarrassing to admit it because, at the end of the day, the only way to fix this is to check your own ego.
If you’ve ever caught yourself saying something like, “the music I listen to is the only real music out there,” then you’re probably guilty of this too.
The truth is, all music is real music. Music itself is such a spiritual and subjective thing that everyone will have very different tastes. Don’t take the kind of music you listen to as part of your identity because that often results in us boxing ourselves into a single genre.
Every form of music has something to teach us; every genre is another dialect of the language of music. Don’t make the mistake of only listening to one dialect.
Additionally, once you’re willing to start exploring other genres of music, you may be quite surprised at what kind of music speaks to you.
I used to only listen to straight up Alternative Rock music because it was the in thing, and I thought that Blues was for old men. (Please forgive me. I was young.)

Once I got over myself and started listening to Blues, it ended up becoming the genre that introduced me to my favorite artists and jazz, and it’s also the one genre that I always go back to listening. I never felt that way about Alternative Rock. Who knew huh?

Getting too caught up with perfection

Only machines can play music perfectly, and even then, would you rather listen to a person play a piano or a machine?
What makes us human, and human music unique, is our inconsistencies and the little quirks that we pick up while practicing. This is why everyone sounds so different from each other; we all have our own quirks.
Humanity itself is imperfect, so why should we expect our playing to be perfect?
Oftentimes during performances, we get way too caught up in playing everything perfectly, which tenses our entire body. If your mind is restricted because of the pressure to play perfectly, your body is going to be restricted as well. Your inability to free your mind will result in the inability to have freedom of movement as you play.
For those of you who have performed before, have you ever noticed that you often play much better during performances which you don’t particularly care about?
What about those performances in which you had a lot of pressure to do well? I’m willing to bet that you made a lot of mistakes. Why else do you think you play so much better when you’re alone at home? The pressure to perform perfectly isn’t there.
Of course, it’s easy to tell people to stop being so hard on themselves and that perfection is really only reserved for robots, but trying to let go of all the pressure is really hard! A book that I’ve found helpful with this is called Effortless Mastery by Kenny Werner.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to practice perfectly, because perfect practice results in perfect technique. How you should see it is that performing and practicing are two different things. When you’re practicing, focus on getting everything as perfect as you can; when you’re performing, it no longer matters if you’re perfect or not. Turn off your mind and the inner critic, and just play.

The physical and psychological connection

As you can see, the common guitar mistakes I’ve pointed out so far deal with both the physical and psychological aspects of playing music.
The final, and most important point to remember is that the mind and the body are one.
What and how you play often reflects the state of your mind. When you feel tense, you sound tense; when you’re in a hurry, you sound rushed. After all, music is about expressing how we feel.
With all that in mind, it is important to remember the best way to keep improving with music is to have a good time. Be positive. Enjoy your practice sessions, and enjoy all your performances, even the ones that end in disaster.
At the end of the day, it’s only music! Keep it fun and playful.