How to Practice Guitar as an Adult Beginner

Below is the transcript for the video titled, "How To Practice Guitar as an Adult Beginner."

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about How to Practice Guitar as an Adult Beginner. Now practicing guitar can be a bit of a challenge. There's lots of things to work on.

Lots of things to understand. But, the most important thing is are we working on the right things, at the right time. According to your playing goals.

So we are going to discuss how to stay motivated so practicing isn't a chore. Which can be overwhelming sometimes, but we are going to get around that. And, we are going to look at a 3-step formula that's going to help this whole practicing flow effortlessly, so you can see continuous results.

And I'm going to share some tools with you to help make this playing songs for fun business that much easier. And you can decide what works best for you.

Alright, let's dive into how to practice guitar for an adult beginner.

Now, motivation, it's a huge one. We are going to look at what is getting in the way of our motivation and so you can see, enjoyment in it.
And it doesn't feel like a chore. And then I'm going to share with you a 3-step formula, that you can use, starting today that's going to make practicing that much more efficient, and that much more effective, so you can see continuous results.

And then I want to share some tools with you, that, you know, some are low-cost, some are no-cost.

And, again, it's just about that efficiency. Alright, because I want to help you to play songs for fun!

And then, if you watch to the end, I'm going to share a free gift with you. Alright, let's go for it!

practicing guitar as n adult beginner at guitar lessons gold coast

The #1 Thing You Should Be Practicing

Alright, the #1 cure for practicing is, it feels like a chore because we are working on quite often the wrong things to practice. A lot of those 'things' that we need, or 'think' we need, are not very musical.

So a lot of people think they need to know theory. They think they need to know every note of the fretboard, how chords are made up, and stuff like that. A bunch of scales. All those are good and very useful.

But if you're in your first year playing songs, it's not the thing to be working on. What I recommend is playing songs! That's where you're going to find your technique.

You're not worried about theory because you don't know how to relate it yet. And if there is a scale in the song, hey, what better time to learn it?

So I recommend just working on songs, your favourite songs that you want to play.

A Simple, 3-step Formula

And now, I want to share with you the 3-step formula that I would recommend to help you play songs for fun. It's a simple acronym called C.P.R.

C stands for 'Chunk it down.' P stands for 'Play it slow.' And R is 'Repetitions.'

What do I mean by 'chunk it down?'

So 'chunk it down' is like, instead of getting at the start of the song and banging it out right to the end of it and getting overwhelmed, trying to work out everything, we are going to take it in small, bite-sized pieces. So we're going to break it down to, sometimes, the ridiculous.

And maybe just 2 chords. Alright? If you're a bit further along, maybe it's 4 chords. Maybe it's an entire verse section, that chord progression that we use there.

But we just chunk it right down to its bare minimum, so there's not so much to remember. We can easily remember it, and we can easily play it.

And we do that with the 'P,' which is 'play it slow.' So you take your song, or you take the chord progression that you're working on, the chord changes, the strumming pattern, whatever it may be, and just slow it down and practice it really, really slow.

This gives the brain enough time to get the information that it knows what to do down into your hands, so you can actively do it and quickly do it. Because if we just go on at full speed, and all this is new for us, the information is just flying out everywhere, and it's not landing where it wants to be.

And repetitions is as simple as, let's use a 2-chord change for example. Alright, so D to G. So all I'm doing there is just doing that once through. I'm working on my chord changes, getting them nice and clean, and fingers coming down together.

But I'm not at full speed, and I'm doing it one round at a time. Now I'm having a break. And this is what I call spaced repetitions.

So always set your repetitions up first as spaced repetitions because that just gives the brain and fingers time to decompress, regroup, and go back into it for the next time around. And then you would just slowly build it up from there.

Alright, that's C.P.R. It's pretty simple to remember but very effective, and it will transform your guitar playing.

Some Recommended No-Cost & Low-Cost Practice Tools:

Let's look at some tools now. You've got your formula. You know what to do. You know you're working on songs. And the first one I recommend is playing along with the song.

That's tool number 1. So whether you got the song on YouTube, off your favourite streaming service, whatever it may be, or off your physical copies at home of your favourite songs, just have the song on and play along with it.

One problem with that is quite often those songs are going by too quickly for our skill level. Yes, we can break it down, chunk it down, but the easiest thing is to slow the song down.

Now you can do this for free through YouTube. Just at the bottom in the settings, it's got the little 'cog' symbol, and you just click on that, and it will pull up a little box, and you'll see 'playback speed' there. And you knock that down to 75% and just work on what you need to work on.

As good as that is, what I do recommend, though, to take it a step further, to make it a little bit more simple so you can start putting that C.P.R. into practice properly, is get an app like "Transpose."

Now "Transpose" is a 'Chrome' extension, so you're going to need the Chrome network set up on your computer. And with that, you just get the extension off the Chrome Store. It's all free.

And when you open it up, you'll see you can slow the song down. You can loop the song.

Alright? So you can play it slow. You can chunk it down. And you set the loop up, and that is your repetitions. Nice and simple.

There might be a little bit of a learning curve with that, a few minutes, maybe 10, 15. But I can guarantee that you'll get it, and it will make practicing so much more fun, so much more enjoyable.

If you don't want free, if you want something a little bit more sophisticated, there is an app called "Amazing Slow Downer." I'm not affiliated with it, but it's a great little app. Costs a few dollars, just a couple of dollars, sorry. Should be no more than $10.

And you can basically do everything you can, plus a little bit more than 'Transpose.' You can slow the song down, loop a section so that you can get those repetitions in.

And another one, if you don't want to do the apps, like set all of those things up, what you can do is get a drum pattern. You can go out and buy a drum machine if you want. They're probably a few hundred bucks. Or you can get an app under $10, and it's called Drum Beats +.

And you just set that up at the tempo you like, and it's just a simple drum pattern loop. In fact, there's hundreds of different options in there. But if you just set it up very simple and just play along with that, so when you're working along with a drum beat behind you, then it sounds like you're jamming with a band.

So that's a really good alternative. It's a better alternative than a metronome, those ones that go click, click from side to side, the old-school ones. You can get digital ones, but I find they can be a little bit dry, especially for adult beginners.

And the drum pattern sounds remind you more of playing along with the song or listening to songs. So that would be my recommendation for tools.

Try them out. See what works best for you. But I know they're going to help you play songs for fun so much quicker and easier. And if you follow that formula, you'll see results all the way through.

Learning to how to practice guitar as an adult on the gold coast

An Easier Way For Adults to Learn Songs

Thanks for watching this far. As I mentioned, I have a free gift for you. And it's my Ultimate Four-Chord Songbook. Now in this songbook, I've distilled down all the things I would recommend as an adult beginner to practice guitar, and we're doing it through songs.

And I run through the C.P.R. formula all the way through it and show you how to practice those songs without it being overwhelming, so it's nice and easy for you.

All this comes in a video format, so it's one song a month over 10 months. You get one new song, and each one of those songs has individual videos where it's all broken down into bite-sized chunks for you, so you can take one bit of information and practice that, how I lay it out with the songs.

So that's one song a month over ten months. Oh, and it's free. Absolutely free. All you need to do is click this link to the songbook here.

Plus, with all the songs broken down on that, you will get a PDF of the chord chart. Now, this is just a one-page chord chart that's nice and easy to follow along. If you can read a book, you can follow this chart. And it just makes learning so much easier because there's not so much visual information coming at you. It's just the chords. I teach you the strumming pattern in the actual videos, and you just play along with that. And you can use it with whatever tool you want.

All those songs in that songbook are presented in a way that you would play them at a campfire, at a party, or anywhere you find yourself with a guitar in your hands, without any other musicians. So it's just laid out as a single acoustic guitar for a campfire-style song.

Looking forward to helping you play songs for fun.

Happy strumming.

About the author:

Allen Hopgood is a certified and innovative guitar teacher. He's dedicated to teaching guitar in a way that's different from how he learned, focusing on methods that get his students playing quickly, having fun, and actually playing music. He teaches in the Gold Coast area of Queensland, Australia.

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