What is your favorite guitar practice hack?
We all have that one trick—a clever routine, mindset shift, or simple habit—that turns an ordinary practice session into something laser-focused, efficient, and even fun.
Maybe it’s a warm-up you swear by, a timing trick that keeps you locked in the groove, or a method to memorize music faster. Whether it’s unconventional or classic, we want to hear it!
What’s the small thing that makes a big difference in your practice?
Share your go-to guitar hack—and don’t be shy! Your tip could be exactly what someone else needs to break through a plateau or reignite their motivation.
Bonus points if you explain why it works for you or share a short video demonstrating it!
Let’s crowdsource the ultimate tonebase-approved guitar toolkit. 
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Hi, all! I have 3 practice hacks that solve most of my problems. Here they are:
1) the three body enjoyment: Enjoy playing note (or position) A, enjoy playing note (or position) B and then enjoying going from A to B.
2) the sweedish method ABA -- BAB: going back and forwards between two things (maybe notes, positions, dinamics, colors, articulations) until I know perfectly what body and mindset changes are involved in the way from A to B and back. Many times, the real journey is the journey back home.
3) the diminished and augmented method: this is an extension of Fernandez method of Version 0. First I play everything without extensions, positions changes, string changes,... i reduce everything to the smallest movements to clear what those are. Then i progressively start implementing the difficulties in order till i get to the actual passage, but after that I keep going augmenting the difficulties for example... if I have a position change from V to VII fret and a jump from 1st to 3rd string ... then i practice from III to X positions jumping from 1st to 5th string. That makes the original jump super easy going back.
If you try them, then let me know how well they work for you!!
Greetings!
Ariel
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Ariel Elijovich a fourth hack that I always find useful is to study from the end to the beginning. That allows to always control that the way I arrive to the end of the passage is the one I desire (talking about hand sensations, dinamics, or whatever) so if I have C D E F G then i study just G, then F G, then E F G... etcetera.
These four hacks are all very basic stuff that I teach all my students since the very beginnings and it's always a pity when you arrive to play more difficult stuff without knowing these tools, which make everything so much easier.
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Ariel Elijovich WOW Ariel! What a gift you've given! I'm going to try all of them! Wish I could get a lesson in person!
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Heidi Hi, Heidi! It's the least i can do. For me it was so different when i was learning, even when I had a very good teacher, many things i had to figure out by myself and it took a lot of time and "angst". So, whenever i can i'm happy to share. I can demonstrate in a video, if you have doubts about any of these four hacks.
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I’m old and will never make money playing guitar. So I don’t practice per se. I play. And in each piece there are always new things to learn and perfect. Scales abound when playing Bach. Perfecting his scales is more interesting than doing Segovia scales. I can practice tremolo all day playing Requerdos de la Alhambra. La Cathedral has lots of slurs for working on pull offs. And my daily hour practice is always fun.
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1. I color code the voices, connecting the notes in a phrase. In particular it helps me see the melody (which I color in a really bright color).
2. I record - starting with very small chunks. It helps me hear the progress I am making. As I work on larger chunks I make sure I overlap them so that I don't build in pauses in my practice.
3. I try not to memorize too early in my learning. When I do that I find I miss details in the score.
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I look for messures that are the same though out a piece. I am always surprizes to find three or more that are the same. So learning one takes care of the others. If there are other messure that are repeats they get different color. . I then try only playing the melody. I to sometimes color the melody notes to make it easier to follow.
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peter hancock this is a very good advice. Reading the piece before playing it and looking for stuff that may help us sintetize a program of study. It's not the same when we know that the piece is 78 bars instead of 126 because many of them are repeats. But it goes further. Many times a piece is evenly difficult/easy and other times a piece is uneven in it's technical challenges. If we look through out the piece in advance we can single out the parts that maybe more stressful and work on them separatedly right away. Also, the energy is rarely spread out evenly. Usually there's some part (usually towards the middle or 3/4 of the piece) where there is an importart development requiring more atention, energy, volumen or virtuosity. If we have it identified, then we can manage our disposition to arrive to that part with what we really need to make it sound better.
Also, but more complicated, reading the piece through and imagining how we want it to sound makes us study already with clear goals and directives for our fingers, helping refine their response and saving us the time of playing cluelessly until we finally decide what we want and so having to change a lot of muscular memory already recorded.
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peter hancock also... watch out for things that are not exactly the same but from which you can extrapolate the same work either for both hands or just for one... for example: Many Brouwer Estudios require same or very alike fingerings from the lef hand even if on different positions (maybe same pattern in different strings or same pattern some frets higher or lower). Some other pieces extrapolate a right hand pattern (maybe an arpeggio) through different strings and though maybe it will not be inmediatelly obvious from looking at the score because the notes will be different, knowing that either left or right or both hands end up doing the same work you have already done earlier makes studying, playing and remembering much more easy!!
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imamima Segovia scales
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I'll start by saying what I need to get rid of- often I'm not laser focused and impatient with my progress. It can happen perhaps because you really want to play the final piece in your wishlist.
But I've improved a lot thanks to some brilliant advice and coaching from Tonebase teachers, especially Martin.
Slurs- also known as an ornament. I'd always thought of it as something 'ornamental', that you can work on as an additional skill after you've done your rigorous scales and arpeggios practice. But what's been game changing is that practicing slurs really strengthens your left hand fingers, improves coordination. My ring and pinky fingers are way more stronger now after practicing slurs all over the fretboard.
Speed bursts- only way to increase your tempo perhaps. I've used it to increase my tempo while maintaining stability and balance. I use HVL's etude no.1 to really work on arpeggios, alongwith Leo Brouwer etude 6 and Mauro Giuliani's etude 5 opus 48.
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My practice trick? I pretend I'm teaching someone else whatever I'm practicing. I like to take small sections of the pieces I play and use those for warming up - be it partial barres, shifting or the clarity and accuracy of a piece like Study in B Minor. As I practice the sections, I do it with the intent of teaching someone. This includes playing slowly and looking for ways to improve, including relaxation, proper technique, smooth transitions. I love working on measures that have multiple techniques and breaking it down to the basics (Melody, Base notes, transitions, slurs). It sure doesn't make me a guitar teacher, but if I can teach myself how to relax when playing, it is worth doing.
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Hi all, for me, besides reading the music, I like to use https://musicspeedchanger.com/ on my phone. It allows me to hear a piece, slower without changing the pitch. It´s a free app (with google adds) and reads wav or mp3 files. I often convert an MP4 from a Youtube video into Mp3 on online tools such as https://ytmp3.as/ and I am good to go. Practicing and listening extremely slowly in the beginning allows for a solid foundation and control of the piece.
For memorization, usually I read the entire piece, taking notes and adding fingerings. After being able to play it all while reading it, I take a few days to memorize it. A good exercise is to use your memory and going back to the sheet only to read the measures you didn´t memorise yet. Playing the entire piece by heart slowly first and then experiment with different tempos.
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Pro Metronome from the App Store. It's a metronome app that allows one to automate tempo changes over time. You choose a starting tempo and an ending tempo and how quickly you'd like to progress a notch or two upward. For exercises, I usually end up 15 bpm faster than where I started over 6 to 10 minutes time. I'll stick with that setting for a week or so, then I'll move the entire program up 5 bpm, and so on.
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Avoiding playing stuff I have already mastered. One way to do this is to compile a few difficult bars from 5 different pieces, and play them in sequence one after the other, with a few repeats each. If the keys are related it sounds kind of cool. This way I have a great workout and I feel like I am making progress in multiple dimensions simultaneously. The tricky part is that the excerpts can be at totally different tempos, so if you can mix and match them in just the right way then you can use the metronome. Obviously takes a lot of prep, but that is kind of the point.
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