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Has your guitar technique practice become boring and uninspiring for you? Are you spending most of your time practicing finger exercises and scales? We all know that we need to practice scales and drills to improve, but it can be difficult to stay inspired and motivated to practice them. Spending too much of your practice time playing exercises that don’t seem relevant to the songs you want to play is not a good way to improve. These are the top problems beginning guitar players face when they try to find the best ways to practice technique: • Trying to practice too many different drills. This causes overwhelm and frustration. • Not knowing what to practice to get the results you want. • Playing drills that are boring and unmusical. This is very demotivating. • Not understanding how to break musical ideas down so that they can be easily learned. There is a way to practice your technique that is not boring, sounds great and will help you learn how to play songs. The solution is to use guitar riffs as part of your practice routine. A riff is a short musical phrase that you can repeat over and over. Why practice guitar riffs? The benefits are many: • Many guitar songs are built around riffs—they sound really cool and are fun to play. • Using riffs in your practice is a great way to build your technique while keeping your practice time fun and sounding good. • Working on song riffs will also help you improve your ear, timing and hand synchronization. • Playing song riffs is “real world” practice that helps you learn to play songs. The more you work with them you will be able to learn new songs much more quickly because they help you improve your foundational guitar technique. Guitar Riff #1 This riff is based on a blues/rock idea. The easiest way to learn riffs is to break them down into smaller sections. The riff is 14 notes long—for now just focus on learning the first group of five notes. Taking longer musical phrases and breaking them up into smaller sections is the key to learning them easily. See and hear this riff and get the tablature in this guitar lesson video to learn the best way to play the notes in it. Make sure you have memorized and can play the notes in the first section before moving on to the second half. It is very important that you memorize the riff so that you can play it from memory. You will not be able to build up speed with it if you have to look at the tablature while you play it. Work on the second half of the riff just like you did the first. Once you have memorized and can play the second half you can put both sections of the riff together. Play it at a slow speed and make sure that you are using consistent fret hand fingerings and pick strokes. Building speed is a byproduct of learning all the notes and having the riff totally memorized. Take your time and don’t try to rush into playing the riff at a high rate of speed right away. Be consistent and the speed will follow. Guitar Riff #2: The second riff we will learn is also based on a blues/rock idea. The best way to learn it is to use the same approach that we used learning the first riff. Watch and learn the fingerings and picking for this one by in the riff lesson video. Remember to take your time learning this riff—commit each section to memory before you put them both together. Guitar riff practice has many benefits. It helps improves your overall technique by giving you “real music” based practice. It also helps with your hand coordination, synchronization and helps you learn how to memorize guitar parts. Both riffs in this lesson sound good on both electric or acoustic guitar. Make sure you start listening for riffs in your favorite songs. You can use riffs from songs you like in your daily practice just like the riffs you learned in this lesson. Guitar riff practice should be an essential part of your practice schedule. About the Author: As a long time guitar instructor, Paul Kleff has taught hundreds of students and developed effective guitar lessons for all levels of guitar players. Go here to get more beginnner guitar lessons and tips.
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