Newer students of mine are always asking for some jazz guitar practice tips that might give them an edge.
“What kind of routine should I be following?”
“How long should I be practicing for?”
“How do I get everything done? There are so many skills and songs to keep up with.”
So, there’s no one size fits all answer to these questions. At different points in your development, you’re going to need different things out of your practice time.
There will be periods of time where you’re going to need to work a lot on just fundamental skills. And there will be times where you’re going to have to really buckle down and work on something to prepare for a gig or an audition.
So there’s no one routine you can do forever. And that’s really a good thing, I think.
It takes some flexibility over time, which is gonna keep you from becoming stagnant and bored as you go.
I’ve practiced all kinds of different ways over the years. Sometimes, especially in college, I was super regimented. I followed a strict schedule and covered a lot of ground in my practice sessions.
Other times I’ve been very, very loose with what I do, working on whatever I feel like needs the most work moment by moment.
While there’s no “magic fix” that will show you exactly what you need to practice forever, I do have five jazz guitar practice tips that will help you get the most out of your playing time.
So let’s dive in here.
Be Consistent
One of the big mistakes people make is thinking you need long practice sessions. That if you can’t practice for an hour or two, it’s not worth it.
It’s easy to get this idea in your head that you need to practice for hours to get good at jazz guitar.
And so in a good faith effort to do that, you practice for as long as you can. And then the next day or a few days later, life gets in the way.
Because you can’t do a full two hour session, you end up not practicing at all.
This is not a great strategy. Especially if you really want to play jazz guitar.
It would be nice to be able to practice all day. But the reality is it’s just not in the cards for a lot of us. You’ve got school or work. You’ve got friends, a family, and other hobbies too.
But it’s ok – you don’t need to spend hours at a time to play jazz guitar well.
What will give you some really great results over time is just practicing for however much as you can every day.
If that means one day, you’re picking up the guitar and you’re just playing a melody. And if that’s all you can do that day, that’s great.
If you can put in some serious time working on something that’s also amazing.
But keep it manageable. Try not to get hung up on this idea that you need to practice a certain amount of time. Do what you can, when you can, as often as you can.
Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin
We all have a tendency to want to get caught up with where we “would have been” if we started five years ago.
While this is natural, it’s also impossible. It also leads people to take on way more material than they can realistically learn.
While you can’t go back in time, you can improve on where you are right now.
Cramming your practice schedule with as many topics as you can just doesn’t work. It’s overwhelming. And to make things worse, you won’t get that much better at any of the things you’re practicing.
What is going to work is picking one thing to focus on, and living with it for a while. Choose something to do for the next week or two.
Spend some real time working really hard on some chord shapes, and let everything else be on “maintenance mode” for a while. Play your other stuff just enough that you don’t forget. But don’t try to improve on anything but chords.
Then repeat the “week or two” cycle with your other skills – scales, arpeggios, licks, whatever you need to work on.
You’d be surprised how much more progress you’ll make in a month of practicing like this. Because you’re not trying to cram everything in at once, you’re able to really improve at the one skill.
And then you retain it better, because you learned it more completely in the first place. You’ll start to create a positive “snowball effect” in your jazz guitar playing.
Take Breaks
When you have a longer period of time to practice, split it into smaller chunks to allow for short breaks.
I once read that the peak the best attention span we can possibly have is about 20 minutes… but that’s the peak. You’d have to build up to that. At first your attention span will be much shorter.
So 20 minutes should be the maximum window of time but you’re thinking about working really hard, straight through.
One great piece of advice from some of Howard Roberts’ books is to take a break as soon as you feel your mind wander. So as soon as you’re getting a little bit bored or antsy, take a little break.
Lay down for a minute. Take a walk around the house. Just take a break from practicing and come back fresh.
If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on a copy of his program Super Chops (out of print last I checked), you can see this at work.
He structures his technique practice session into 10 minutes of playing, 2 minutes of break.
By practicing in short bursts and taking mental breaks, you can keep coming back with fresh attention span and get more out of your practice time.
Do The Simple Stuff
We all want to work on more advanced things. We want the next advanced concept. The next chord substitution. Or the next cool thing to do when you’re soloing.
But a lot of people chase advanced techniques at the expense of the basics.
If you don’t know all of your chord shapes cold, what good is a new chord substitution?
If you can’t play the scales you already “know,” is a new scale really going to make you sound better?
The fundamentals are the simple stuff. They are the things that we all want to skip over. But here’s the secret: the fundamentals are what the “advanced stuff” is made of.
We all develop crutches in our playing. You figure something out that gets you through a gig, class, or performance, and then you don’t go back to do it right. And these situations start to stack up.
So you become a pretty good guitar player, with huge holes in your foundation. It’s an uncomfortable place to be.
But there’s a simple solution for this, that you can start doing now.
Look for the simplest thing that you can’t do as well as you should be able to. And then work on that skill.
This will ensure that number one, you’re building up actually building up a solid foundation. And number two, it’s going to make everything else you play easier.
It’s uncomfortable to take an honest look at what you’re lacking. And it doesn’t feel great to realize that there’s some basic stuff you can’t do very well.
But once you address the gaps in your playing, you’re going to ome out the other side as a whole new player.
So do the simple stuff. If there’s something simple that you can’t really do, that’s what you should be working on.
Make it Fun to Play
It’s very easy to get caught up in practicing. What scales are you going to work on? Making sure you’re practicing what you aren’t good at. Working on your time. Trying to get faster.
These are all great technical things to work on. It’s easy to get caught up in that side of things.
But sometimes you come up for air and you realize you’ve been working on the guitar, but you haven’t actually played in a while.
It’s very easy to do. To get sucked into working on the guitar all the time.
And it’s also very easy to just play. You know, find a program that can generate some backing tracks over a jazz song as you like. My favorite program to work with is iRealPro.
It’s so easy these days to put on a backing track. And now you’re playing with this imaginary band that’s playing for as long as you want.
Better yet if you have a friend or two who also play, get together in someone’s backyard and play some jazz for a while.
Play some songs and just kind of goof around. It doesn’t have to be anything serious.
You don’t have to join a band or anything. I even tend to just play through tunes by myself. No backing track, maybe a metronome.
There are lots of ways you can play. So find some time to play – not just practice.
Conclusion
So hopefully these tips will help you as you go through developing your own practice.
Be consistent. Don’t spread yourself too thin. Take breaks as you go. Find the simplest thing you can’t do yet. Make time to play – not just practice – your guitar.
Learning jazz guitar is always a work in progress, so what and how you practice is always changing. It’s important to be flexible and realize that what works for you today may not be the right answer tomorrow.
What do your practice sessions usually look like? Let me know in the comments below.