The Most Common Misuses of Scales and Exercises

Repeating the same things endlessly by rote is not as helpful as you may have been led to believe. Without attention, intention, or goals, you risk creating a practice that’s more numbing than productive. But that’s not the only way excessive scale and exercise practice can sabotage your progress.

You may be unconsciously attempting to postpone or eliminate the messy part of learning. Exercises are orderly and predictable. You understand exactly where you want to put your fingers, you have an idea of how it will sound, and you have a limited amount of decisions and corrections to make. That process rarely describes your experience, though, when you begin putting together melodies, chords, right hand accompaniment patterns, and singing.

When you’re learning anything new on guitar, it can sound awful to you and you may even let that make you feel stupid or inept. Who wants to feel that? Wouldn’t it be better to just keep building skills that will enable you to skip to the part where you play well?

Although that approach may seem appealing and even logical, it’s not reasonable. There’s not much chance you’ll maintain sufficient motivation for practice if you’re not actually making music, and even if you persist, you’ll still be missing a lot of the skills required to learn new material without encountering discomfort. Vulnerability and courage are integral components of musicianship, and no attempts at avoiding them will change that.

The Best Way to Use Scales and Exercises

It’s not hard to change your pattern of either avoiding or misusing scales and exercises, and you’ll see a big improvement when you do. Make a plan and stick with it for two weeks and you’ll be hooked!

Choose the exercises that best serve your goals and your current level of playing and practice them at a tempo that enables you to execute them correctly and with good technique. Some exercises will be helpful for a period of time before you grow out of them. Others, like this one, will be useful indefinitely. Remember to go slowly and listen to your body to avoid pain and injury and to correctly develop strength, stretch, and speed.

There’s no end to the benefits you’ll receive from working with scales. You can find the best ways to do that in Learning to Play Lead Guitar and the Lead Playing and Scales category in the Virtual Studio. If you’re not already in the Studio, join now to work with the lessons you need.

Designate the first 5% – 15% of your practice for warming up with technical work. Check out this practice plan as a general guide and use the DAILY to personalize it. Use the metronome consistently and at a tempo you can play with accuracy. Be mindful and musical!

Then, Play Music!

The best way to continually improve your guitar playing is to play the music you love. Practice your scales and exercises at the beginning of each session but be sure to give your attention to music for the bulk of your practice time. If you’re not used to warming up with exercises, you might have to push through some resistance to get started. If, however, you’ve been using exercises to avoid playing music, you’ll have to face your resistance and commit to learning and playing songs, however unsettling it might feel. You’re going to love the results!