The habits that you use to practice guitar will ultimately form the pathway to your study approach and the way that you play guitar throughout your entire life. 

Habits, (both good and bad) can have a direct impact on the excellence that comes across in your playing and in the quality of the music you perform. 

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All of the musical gains that you will ultimately see from your guitar playing will come down to the way that you apply your most beneficial habits.

Either your habits will benefit you, or the habits that you have could possibly interfere with your ability to play the best music that you are possible of creating.

For most musicians (and guitar players in particular), developing; songs, chords, scales and licks takes up the most practice time when studying guitar. 

But, there are some things which are really important to consider about playing guitar that should to be addressed as habits alongside of applying all of what you learn from songs, chords, scales and theory. 

In this lesson we’re going to explore a series of habits that will be very important for you to focus on prior to applying all of those other ideas. 

We’ll talk about the way you can achieve better note choices and phrasing, and some the methods for perfecting a part (whether jamming, or recording the idea). 

Plus, we’ll also look at what needs to go into developing your own style on guitar and we’ll spend some time on the value that comes out of putting a focused effort toward the study of perfection. So, grab your guitar and let’s get started with the study of our first habit.

HABIT 1).  "Sound and the Musical Message"

Excellent guitar playing can be a lot like typing an important letter or email. Whenever you need to write a serious letter to your lawyer or accountant, or perhaps write a script for a play or a production, it must be done to the best of your ability.

When we write seriously, we choose all of the words carefully and we carefully consider how everything fits together. Then, before we send it, we read and re-read how that message sounds from our mind out of our fingers and finally onto the audience. 

As a guitarist, it can work wonders to get into the habit of spending the same amount of time thinking about how the sound that you want to hear (with your musical message), is being delivered from the; note choices, the phrasing, and the technique. 

Remember, scale shapes and patterns on the neck are only a guide to help us if we get lost. Example one contains an example of this…

Simple representation, (the notes themselves)

 Exact representation, (the album version)

HABIT 2).  "Think Before You Play"

Have you ever been in a social situation and you mis-spoke? Maybe you said something kind of inappropriate and you immediately regretted it? 

I’m pretty sure that’s happened to all of us. But, that age old saying, "Think Before you Speak" applies to music just as much as it does to social situations. 

If you can make it a habit to plan, plan, plan before you head into every serious playing situation it will go a long way because that planning is the foundation and it’s the practice that leads you to perfection of the part. 

This is everything if you're recording because you want to have your final take be as perfect as possible. A great way to practice this is by simply listening to something unfamiliar and copying it. Let me give you an idea for how this can work.

Example 2): Think Before You Play

Loop pedal example – playback! 

 HABIT 3).  "Creating Your Own Style"

The last habit I have for you is based on the habits that are involved with creating your own style. This happens generally by doing what musicians will sometimes call, “selective stealing.” 

This musical form of theft happens from 3 main areas of another musician’s approach; their style, their phrasing and also their compositional ideas. 

What, “selective stealing” means to our practice habits is this...

When we start to pay a lot more attention to all of the details and the subtleties for how another musician performs a musical idea, we can gain a lot of useful playing information. 

By practicing their style and their phrasing along with their approach to musical composition. 

When we do this in detail - to the absolute letter - we can then take in and use that information to carefully shape our own methods of playing and ultimately our own voice on guitar. 

Example three is an example of how you can work at developing this habit yourself by exploring the details surrounding a BB King style lick.

CONCLUSION:

Guitar players (and musicians in general), have a tough job when it comes to understanding the best habits to devote practice time. 

As practicing musicians, we spend years on the study of music theory and on playing techniques for our instrument. After we do that for many years we get to a point where we’ve developed our basic musical skills along with some traits of our own personal playing style. 

Because we will often start working in more professional situations at that point, it can be hard to spend the necessary additional time on building more refined habits.

Do your best to work on the playing habits I’ve covered in this lesson. 

Once you can repeat and develop these habits and start implementing variations on them, (as in areas like the notes you choose and the changes to rhythmic displacement - things like that), you’ll notice some interesting and very beneficial things start to happen in your guitar playing.