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Once you’ve scheduled your guitar practice and decided what you’re going to work on, there’s another important question: What should you actually do with the material once you start practicing it? Here’s Five smart practice steps.
Maybe you’re learning a blues lick. Maybe it’s a difficult section of a song, a new fingerpicking pattern, a challenging chord change, or a technique you’ve been trying to clean up. Repeating the material over and over isn’t always the most efficient way to improve.
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Jeff Scheetz approaches virtually any practice challenge using a process he calls the Five Smart Practice Steps. The idea is simple: no matter what you’re learning, work through it using the same five-part process.
The Five Smart Practice Steps
1) Want It
2) Break It Down
3) Work on the Pieces
4) Repeat, Measure, and Track
5) Get Feedback
Together, these steps turn repetition into a much more deliberate process. As Jeff explains: “Whether you’re working on a blues lick, a song, or a new fingerpicking pattern, look at it through the lens of these five Smart Steps.”
Smart Practice Step 1: Want It
Jeff’s first step may sound almost too simple: you have to want to improve what you’re practicing. There’s a significant difference between sitting down because “it’s time to practice” and sitting down with the intention of getting better at something specific. That difference is focus.
“You’ve got to want to practice it for the purpose of improving—not just because it’s time to practice and you feel like you have to do it.”
Before starting an exercise, lick, song, or technique, identify what you want to accomplish.
Instead of thinking: I guess I’m supposed to practice this blues lick.
Think: I want to play this lick cleanly, in time, and eventually use it naturally when I improvise.
That shift gives the work a purpose. As Jeff says: “You’ve got to have the ‘want to.’ Get your mind thinking that way before you start, and it will really help.” This doesn’t mean you’ll always feel wildly motivated to practice. It means approaching the material with conscious attention instead of simply going through the motions.
Smart Practice Step 2: Break It Down
The second step is one of the most important principles of effective practice: Make the problem smaller. When guitarists struggle with a song, solo, lick, or exercise, there’s a natural temptation to keep starting at the beginning and playing the entire thing again. That often means repeatedly practicing the parts you can already play while rushing through the section that actually needs work.
Instead, isolate the problem. “It’s much easier to deal with smaller chunks than it is to deal with the whole thing. If you keep playing an entire piece all the way through, you can miss a lot of the little nuances along the way.”
Suppose you’re working on a four-measure lick and only the last measure is giving you trouble. You don’t necessarily need to practice all four measures. Practice the last one.
If one beat is the problem, isolate that beat. If one transition between two notes is breaking down, work specifically on that transition.
Break Guitar Problems Down by Hand
Guitarists have another useful way to simplify difficult material: separate what each hand is doing. Jeff points out: “A great way for guitarists to break something down is to look at what the left hand is doing and then look at what the right hand is doing. That gives you a clear separation.”
If a lick isn’t working, ask: Is the fretting hand missing the notes? Is the picking hand using an awkward stroke? Are both hands doing their jobs correctly but failing to synchronize?
Breaking the problem apart makes it much easier to identify what actually needs improvement.
Smart Practice Step 3: Work on the Pieces Individually
Identifying the smaller pieces isn’t enough. Now you have to practice them separately. Suppose the beginning of a blues lick involves a tricky picking pattern while the second half contains a hammer-on, pull-off, and bend. Rather than repeatedly playing the whole lick, work on the picking section independently. Then work on the hammer-on, pull-off, and bend.
Jeff explains: “Don’t think that just because you broke something down and looked at it that you’re good. Work on those small sections individually.” Slow things down when necessary. Repeat the movement. Focus on accuracy, timing, articulation, relaxation, and tone. Once the individual components are becoming comfortable, begin connecting them. This is an important distinction.
Don’t repeatedly practice the entire problem. Practice the parts that are causing the problem. Only after those pieces improve should you begin putting the complete passage back together.
Smart Practice Step 4: Repeat, Measure, and Track
Once you can execute the individual pieces and begin reconnecting them, repetition becomes essential. But Jeff recommends something more useful than simply “play it a bunch of times.” Measure what you’re doing. “Once it’s all put together, apply repetition and measure and track your efforts.”
For guitar practice, that might mean keeping track of: metronome settings, tempo increases, number of clean repetitions, how long you practiced an item, which section still causes problems, the highest tempo you can play accurately, or what you plan to work on during the next session.
Imagine you’re working on an alternate-picking exercise.
Instead of writing ‘Practiced alternate picking,’ you might record: ‘Played cleanly at 90 BPM. Tried 95 BPM, but timing became inconsistent. Start at 90 BPM tomorrow and work toward 95.
Now your next practice session has a starting point. You’re no longer relying on memory or guessing whether you’re improving. You have evidence of what happened.
Smart Practice Step 5: Get Feedback
The final Smart Step is feedback. Practice is ultimately an attempt to change something about your playing. To know whether that change is actually happening, you need some way to evaluate the results. An experienced guitar teacher can provide valuable feedback by identifying problems that you may not notice yourself. “If you have a guitar instructor, go to them and say, ‘I’ve been working on this. What do you think?’”
But you don’t need a teacher sitting beside you every time you practice. One of the most useful practice tools is something almost every guitarist already owns: a phone. Record yourself. Then listen—or watch—without playing at the same time.
You may notice that your timing isn’t as steady as it felt while playing. A bend may be slightly out of tune. Notes might not be ringing clearly. Your picking motion may be larger than you realized. Recording separates performing from evaluating.
Jeff recommends making this a regular habit: “Even if you have an instructor, get in the habit of recording yourself and analyzing yourself.” The purpose isn’t to criticize every mistake. It’s to gather useful information. What improved? What still needs work and should you practice next?
“You need to assess where you are, see what you’ve been practicing, and take note of what you need to do next.” That feedback completes the cycle—and gives you direction for the next practice session.
The Five Smart Practice Steps in Action
Imagine you’re learning a new guitar lick that you can play slowly, but that falls apart when you increase the tempo.
Here’s how the Five Smart Practice Steps might work:
- Want It
Decide exactly what you want to accomplish: play the lick cleanly and in time at the target tempo.
- Break It Down
Identify which part of the lick breaks down. Separate it into smaller phrases, and examine what each hand is doing.
- Work on the Pieces
Practice the difficult sections independently at a manageable tempo.
- Repeat, Measure, and Track
Reconnect the phrases, use a metronome, and record the tempos at which you can consistently play the lick cleanly.
- Get Feedback
Record yourself, listen critically, and identify what still needs work.
The next time you practice the lick, you’re not starting over. You’re continuing a process.
Turn Every Practice Item Into a Process
One of the biggest advantages of the Five Smart Practice Steps is that they can be applied to almost anything you want to improve on guitar: difficult solos, chord progressions, fingerpicking patterns, scales, rhythm grooves, new techniques, or a complete song.
The material changes, but the process remains essentially the same: Focus on improving it. Break it down. Work on the pieces. Repeat and track the results. Get feedback.
Instead of asking only, “What am I going to practice today?”, start asking another question: “How am I going to practice it?”
That distinction is at the heart of practicing smarter.
Continue Learning
Explore the rest of this series:
- How To Practice Smart for Guitar Players
- How To Practice Smart: What Is Practice
- How To Practice Smart: The Three Ps
- How To Practice Smart: Smart Zone Practice
- How To Practice Smart: The Four Rs
About the Education Team
Four music-industry veterans with decades of combined experience in music education, curation, and production at TrueFire and ArtistWorks. The TrueFire Studios Education Team plans and edits this content and works with our master-musician faculty to keep it accurate and genuinely useful.
Featured Contributor
JS
Jeff Scheetz is TrueFire’s Director of Education and a veteran touring guitarist who has shared stages with the Scorpions, .38 Special, ELO, Eric Johnson, and Steve Vai. With eight albums of original music, numerous TrueFire courses, and 300-plus clinics worldwide, he blends blues, rock, and instructional clarity built over decades of teaching.