I have found with some of my students that the number one obstacle to learn how to play guitar is motivation.You begin to learn to play but it just seems too difficult and it doesn’t seem like you are ever going to get any better and your fingers hurt and your hands are cramping up and it is just not much fun to play. A couple of methods that I have always used to keep myself and my students motivated when practicing can also be applied to your practice times. Motivation is the key to success when learning to play guitar.

First of all, I have always found it beneficial to record practice times. You can get a simple tape player from the store and just hit the record button before you start playing. This does a couple of things for you. It allows you to listen to yourself and see what you really sound like and pick out the parts that you need to work on.It also allows you to track your progress and become more and more confident as you play. Sometimes you may think that you are stuck and you aren’t really making any progress when that is not really true. It is hard to see how far you have progressed sometimes when you cannot hear the difference for yourself. So get a tape recorder, or there are several other methods for recording such as plugging into your computer. But make sure you record one practice session every few weeks and go back to check your progress between the two recordings.This will keep you going back for more lessons and it will encourage you to practice more because you will be able to see the difference that working on something over time can make on your skill level and track your progress.

Jam Tracks

Once you get some of the basics down you should start playing along to jam tracks. A jam track is simply a music track on a CD that leaves some part of the music out for you to play. This does a couple of things for you. It helps you to learn to do more than just play on your own where you have control of all the timing and rhythm. It helps you to learn how to play with a band with a steady rhythm and not stray off course from that rhythm. It is also very fun and encouraging to hear the band playing behind and with you. It gives you more confidence as you learn to play. If you like playing along with the song that you are trying to learn then you should check out Riff Master Pro. It is a program that allows you to take any music track that you want to practice with and slow it down or speed it up as you see fit. So if you are having a hard time getting part of the music down you simply slow it down so that you can hear each individual part and then continue to practice it at half speed until you get that down and slowly bring it back up to speed. This is an amazing tool that I use almost every day in my practice sessions.