Hit A Wall

[Richard O'connor]

might be a stupid question but is their such thing as over practising? i felt i was making good progress last week, practising every night at economy picking. But this week for some reason i feel i’ve taken a step backwards almost. I seem to have hit a wall and can’t progress anymore. Maybe its just a patience thing, and it will come soon. Just frustrating and wondered if anyone has this?

 

[Filip Tomiša]

Know your limits. What I mean by that is don’t overdo it, don’t force yourself too much. Sometimes taking a break helps. Also you can’t always expect to progress at the same pace. Sometimes you learn a new technique and you feel like you progressed so much but perfecting that technique takes way longer and that’s why you might feel like you are not progressing.

 

[idssdi]

I think there is. I sometimes like in playing better after I haven’t played for a couplen of days

 

[Dominik Gräber]

I notice that even within a single practice session. I try to learn something and play it over and over again until at some point it gets worse. That’s when making a short break can be very helpfull.

 

[Richard O'connor]

I play guitar everyday without fail. I always make time even if it’s just an hour at the least. Maybe I’ll take a day off or something.

 

[Steven Huth]

Don’t forget to have fun! If you get burned out on something, move on to something else. Have fun with what you are practicing. Keep the end goals in mind. Why are you learning to economy pick?

 

[Jen Hapke]

Are you only practicing sweep picking?
If so you can swap between this and the next day you learn something different.
Or you have a day you only play some songs and have fun.
This is what I do and it helps me. I’m learning the CAGED system right now and I get exhausted. So I started to combine it with all the early intermediate lessons.

 

[Richard O'connor]

I’ve been working on mainly economy picking and a bit of sweeping. Think I might just have a few days off from practising and just play along to a few songs.

 

[Jen Hapke]

Yeah this can work.
One thing papa gates says in some lesson is, if you think you are stuck in a tempo, then skip the tempo you are stuck in and increase the tempo and try as much as you can to play to this more difficult tempo. This will probably sound horrible but if you go back to the tempo you are stuck with you might think this isn’t so bad and I sometimes works better than before.

 

[Brian Haner Sr.]

We all want better technique – but it’s just a means to an end. Try practicing playing what you hear in your head. Put on a backing track and DON’T play for the first 4 bars. Instead hear a 4 bar phrase in your head. Then play that phrase on your guitar for the next 4 bars. Rinse and repeat. And by phrase – I mean melody. NOT JUST A SCALE. 90% of the guitar players I hear are just regurgitating scales and patterns they have learned and they are simply not musical. If you want to be a great improvisor, you need to play what you hear. This is much harder than it sounds and is as much about developing your ear as it is about developing your guitar chops.

 

[idssdi]

@brian Haner Sr. I usually play the melodies in my head until i runiet out and then I play patterns from my muscle memory so I can figure out more melodies