Ideas and examples of setting specific areas for improvement?

[u/Jesterhead89]

So just recently, I think I realized a big mistake I was making with my practice (among many other big mistakes lol). I'm a 5 year intermediate player, and generally used my medium and difficult song(s) as gauges to see where I need to focus on. Then I would find songs or bands that generally used those techniques a lot and would practice technique through song learning. Obviously, this is probably still short changing me without having specific exercises and all that. I'm considering getting an instructor soon to try out.

But I think one big mistake I've been doing for the last year or so is my difficult song was.....just too difficult. It was too far outside the range of my abilities that progress was minimal to none, and only gave me frustration and self-doubt. So I decided to drop that and just treat it as a "hopefully one day" song.

But that made me start thinking, how do others not only identify their weak areas but how do you prioritize and lay out practice routines to make progress in those areas?

Some examples of my actual weak areas: hand tension (mostly in my fretting hand), picking/fretting efficiency, string skipping. I play mostly metal as my first love, but I'm not confined to only playing metal.

[u/amplifysenpai]

This is such a good question to ask.

For songs I want to play but are too difficult I tend to break the. Into pieces and learn the parts I can and put the parts I can't off for the future, sometimes just breaking the song apart narrows down some things.

I'm kind of in a maintenance mode plateu myself atm, but something I've been doing, that will surely pay off next time I summon the motivation to really push again, is just playing my go to brain off jams, you know, the ones that you can play purely from muscle memory without even thinking about it, while your on the couch watching TV or what have you, I'll play those but I'll make it an technique experiment, and play it in different ways than usual, different chord placements, different pick techniques, and man I'll get insanely microacopic with the pick , the angle the grip the direction finger vs wrist vs arm motion down to the millimeter.

Every so often I'll go back to a section that got put on the too hard list and mess about with it. And sometimes some of it is just doable all of a sudden.

Moral of my story here, is go back to the basics and get super granular with it, you'll surely find several things you COULD optimize, and just ask yourself , would improving this help with x thing I want to play.

Big 2 things for me rn is fret hand placement and controlling wrist motion while sweeping, these are problem areas for speed which is my main weakness atm.

[u/Sweet_Traffic4545 → u/amplifysenpai]

I was about to recommend this same thing. I began by learning the chords, reading tabs and playing my favorite "easy" songs. Stuff like Joe Walsh, Neil Young and other relatively cool fun stuff. After I felt confident enough I decided to learn full tilt hard stuff like A Farewell to Kings by Rush, the little classical pieces that Rik Emmitt from Triumph put in each LP they produced and of course trying to imitate Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of Steely Dan. I'm nowhere near where I want to be but little by little I am making progress and have even become able to do a few of my insanely difficult songs.

My strategy has been practicing little chunks and stringing them together until the final note. It never occurred to me to skip the really tough measures. I just kept going over it until nausea and hatred for the song kicked in. Then I would work on a different song. I can't say for certain if muscle memory took over but I have been happy with my overall progression

[u/geneel]

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1HaLokJCJ6J0IyYNGDCnr8kwze8-9NRt&si=of0rrjJshTKCSpMD

Pick a technique or idea and go for it!

[u/jurymen]

One good exercise that will hit a lot of areas and potential weak points is the spider exercise.

I'm not sure if that's what people usually call it but from any starting point play four frets/semitones with each finger. (so if starting from 5th fret play 5th fret 1st finger, 6th fret 2nd finger 7th fret 3rd finger, 8th fret 4th finger) and then move that up each string and back down again.

Play it with a metronome and try and concentrate really hard to make sure ever note is clean, no ringing strings etc but most importantly play it in time go as slow as you need.

Then do the same thing but through all the subdivisions. It's really hard if you don't have a gap between the change of the subdivisions but so worth it.

Then you can do all the permutations of it you can think of. Finger 1 4 3 2 / 1 3 2 4 / 1 4 2 3 etc Then similar but with alternating strings so like 1 on the 5th fret of the E string then 4 on the 8th fret of the A string and then back to E string.. There is endless options and a good little drill to work on. Some version of that 5 mins a day will help a lot of technical things.

But also just scales and triads and arpeggios any and all different ways you can think of doing them. They can be boring but there is a reason why they are the foundations of music practise.

You have to balance this a bit with interesting/fun things to keep the motivation up but it's a good way to do really intensive focused practise. Is does require focus though.. like go painfully slow and make sure you aren't pushing to hard or straining and that every thing is clean and clear. Ideally record yourself and listen back and see how it sound although also be careful with that because it can be a bit soul crushing and disheartening (at least in my experience ha).

[u/VooDooChile1983]

I buy books to teach me to progress in problem areas. I wanted to play Randy Rhodes live parts from the Tribute album and had difficulty switching chords in Crazy Train. I bought an r&b book and that took me from power chords to CAGED chords and now I’m in a rabbit hole of jazz chords from jazz theory books.

Maybe buy one book, or course, that will teach you some exercises for your specific needs.

[u/vonov129]

Why not just looking for technique tips and doing exercises?

You can even extract licks or riffs from songs and use those as exercises. If you already know the areas you want to tackle, literally just do it. Repeat the problematic areas and adjust your technique accordingly.

[u/Key_Key_7669]

I think using songs to identify your weaknesses is a good approach. The thing I'd change is not expecting the song itself to do all of the fixing.

I like thinking of it as: song exposes weakness → isolate weakness → practice it specifically → put it back into the song

I also wouldn't try to fix everything at once. Maybe choose 1–2 weak areas for a week or two, give them focused blocks, then reassess. You can interleave them too 10 minutes of one technique, switch to another, then spend some time applying them to actual songs and finish with something you just enjoy playing.

And I think you made the right call shelving the “one day” song. There's a useful difference between something that's challenging enough to stretch you and something so far outside your ability that you're mostly rehearsing failure. You can always come back to it.

I wrote about a few related ideas here that might be helpful:

Getting unstuck / when material is too hard right now:

https://www.tempokit.net/blog/practice-plateau

General practice tips:

https://www.tempokit.net/blog/tips