How To Practice On Purpose and Practice Smart

Every time you pick up a guitar, you’re doing something with it—but not all guitar time serves the same purpose. Jeff Scheetz breaks that time into three simple categories he calls the 3 Ps: Play, Profit, and Practice.

Understanding the difference between them can help explain why some guitarists spend a lot of time with the instrument but still feel like their playing isn’t improving as quickly as they’d like. As Jeff puts it: “Every time you pick up your guitar, you’re going to be doing one of these three Ps. Which one you spend the most time focusing on can have a big impact on how far you go.”

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Practice On Purpose: Play

The first category is the easiest to recognize: play. This is the time you spend with the guitar simply because you enjoy it. You might play a few songs for a friend, improvise aimlessly, figure out a TV theme by ear, experiment with a new pedal, or just sit on the couch and noodle around.

There’s nothing wrong with any of that. In fact, it’s essential. Jeff says: “Playing is really important because that’s the fun of it. That’s probably why we picked up the guitar in the first place—we wanted to have some fun.”

Playing keeps your relationship with the instrument enjoyable. It encourages creativity, exploration, and spontaneity. It’s where you can experiment without worrying about whether you’re doing something the “right” way.

The potential problem comes when all of your guitar time falls into this category. It’s easy to play for an hour and feel like you’ve practiced for an hour. But if most of that time is spent repeating things you already know, improvising without a goal, or simply exploring sounds, you may not be addressing the specific skills that need improvement.

Jeff describes the distinction clearly: “You don’t want to spend too much time in the first P zone because it can make you feel like you’re putting in the hours without really getting very far as far as improving goes.” Playing is valuable. It just isn’t the same thing as focused practice.

Practice On Purpose: Profit

The second P is profit. Jeff uses the term more broadly than simply making money with the guitar. Profit refers to guitar playing that serves a practical purpose or obligation beyond your own personal development. A paid gig is an obvious example. If your band performs several nights a week, you’re using your guitar skills professionally and earning money from them.

But profit can also include unpaid situations. You might play guitar at church, record a solo for a friend’s project, rehearse material for an upcoming show, accompany another musician, or play at an event because someone asked you to.

In each case, you’re using the abilities you already have to accomplish something. “Profit doesn’t necessarily mean making money. It can also mean doing something with your guitar that’s for someone else rather than specifically for your own enjoyment or improvement.”

This kind of playing can absolutely make you better. Performing regularly improves confidence and consistency. Playing with other musicians strengthens timing and listening skills. Recording exposes weaknesses that may not be obvious when you’re playing casually.

As Jeff points out: “If you were playing four nights a week at a gig, you’re going to get better.” But improvement during these activities is usually a by-product, not the primary purpose. And that creates an important limitation. If you repeatedly perform something with poor technique, weak timing, excess tension, or another bad habit, you may simply reinforce that problem.

“The danger with both playing and profiting is that you can easily develop bad habits and keep doing things the wrong way when you’re not really monitoring how you’re doing them.” That leads to the third P.

Practice On Purpose: Practice

Practice is different because improvement is the reason you’re doing it. Jeff defines practice as: “Doing activities specifically designed for the purpose of improving performance in an organized and systematic way.”

That definition separates practice from nearly everything else you can do with a guitar. If you’re playing a song because it’s fun, you’re playing. If you’re playing the song because you have to perform it Saturday night, you may be profiting.

But if you isolate a difficult section of that song, slow it down, identify the problem, and work deliberately until you can execute it more accurately, you’re practicing. The difference is not necessarily what you’re playing. The difference is why you’re doing it and how you’re approaching it.

Practice On Purpose

Focused practice begins with an objective. Maybe your bends are consistently sharp. Your alternate picking breaks down at higher tempos. Your chord changes aren’t clean. You lose the groove when playing rhythm guitar. There’s a four-measure section of a solo you simply can’t play smoothly.

Practice means identifying that problem and working on it intentionally. As Jeff says: “You’re not doing activities just for the fun of it or because you don’t have anything better to do. You’re doing activities that are designed to improve your performance.”

That idea can be summed up in two words: Practice on purpose. When you know exactly what you’re trying to improve, you can choose an exercise, musical passage, tempo, repetition strategy, or practice technique that directly addresses it. That makes practice fundamentally different from simply logging time.

All Three Ps Matter

The goal isn’t to eliminate Play or Profit and spend every waking minute practicing. All three have value. Play keeps the instrument enjoyable and encourages creativity. Profit gives you opportunities to apply your skills in real musical situations. Practice is where you deliberately build and refine those skills. The key is recognizing which one you’re doing.

A guitarist can easily spend ten hours a week playing and performing while spending almost no time deliberately addressing weaknesses. Another guitarist may spend fewer total hours with the instrument but devote a meaningful portion of that time to focused improvement. Over months and years, that difference can become significant.

So the next time you pick up your guitar, ask yourself a simple question: Which P am I doing right now? There’s no wrong answer. But if your goal is to improve, make sure some of that guitar time is truly practice.

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: Smart Zone Practice
• How To Practice Smart: Five Smart Steps
• How To Practice Smart: The Four Rs