Twenty focused minutes beat an hour of noodling. The difference is deliberate practice: you choose one thing to improve, work on exactly that, and check the result.
Five rules
- One goal per session. "Change from C to G without a gap" is a goal. "Get better" is not. Write it down before you start.
- Slow and accurate. Your hands learn whatever you repeat, mistakes included. Play at a tempo where every note is clean.
- Work on the hard bit. Don't replay the whole piece to reach the two beats you can't play. Cut out those two beats and loop them.
- Short blocks. Five to ten minutes on one task, then switch or take a short break. Your attention fades long before your fingers do.
- Stop before it gets sloppy. When mistakes start creeping in, stop. Ten more sloppy loops teach your hands the sloppy version.
Try it
The first exercise is the hard bit of countless songs in G major: the change from C to G, cut out and looped. Two strums of C, two of G, nothing else. Lift all fingers together and place them together; the G should land right on the beat, not a hair late.
The second is the C major scale in open position, one octave up and down: index on fret 1, middle on fret 2, ring on fret 3. Listen for buzzes and for gaps when you cross strings.
The most common mistake is playing through errors. When you miss, stop, slow down by 10 bpm and play the bar three times clean before going on.