"How do I get better?" It's an obvious question that occurs to many guitarists, regardless of their level. It's also a question that the guitar teacher should be able to answer, since if they don't know how you can improve they can't help you much.

This page should give you some guidance about where to focus your efforts whether you're working with a teacher or not. Some of it is controversial: this is my way of doing things and, regardless of what some people might tell you, teaching and learning aren't sciences and nobody knows the one "right" way to do them.

Developmental Stages

It helps to know where you're up to in your development, and for this I tend to use a few general categories. What's in them varies quite a bit depending on what sort of music you want to play.

Beginner

I tend to divide "beginners" into two camps: the Rank Beginner and the Advancing Beginner.

Rank Beginner

This is where we all start, and begins before you first lay hands on a guitar. Being a rank beginner is hard work: playing makes your fingers sore, annoys the people you live with and can be extremely frustrating.

The first step beyond being a rank beginner is to buy (or perhaps hire) a guitar. Most players will do best with an acoustic guitar rather than an electric one. Nylon-string guitars can be easier on the fingers, and are a better idea if your budget is very small; I don't recommend spending much on your first guitar unless you're quite sure you'll keep on with it after the first year. If you have a bit more to spend, a steel-stringed acoustic is most suitable for most types of music besides classical (and certain kinds of jazz). If you're spending more than about £50, take a guitarist with you to give their opinion; as a rank beginner you'll struggle to make an informed choice. You need to have your own guitar before you go for your first lesson, and you must have access to it throughout the week, not just on certain days.

I recommend that beginners use the softest plectrum they can find. The strumming sound is much more pleasing that you get with fingers and learning to use a plectrum will come in useful later.

Your goals at this point are:

• Learn a handful of chords -- most of what we call the major and minor triads in open position (A, Am, C, D, Dm, E, Em, G) and at least some of the seventh chords that go with them
• Be able to change between these chords fairly quickly
• Be able to strum the guitar with a reasonable-sounding rhythm
• Be able to read a chord chart for a song, more or less at sight in simple cases

Achieving these goals means you'll be able to play a large variety of songs. It's very important that this part should be as enjoyable as possible, which means not overburdening yourself with loads of theory and not worrying about the minutiae of technique.

The first of these points -- gaining the practical skill before learning the theory behind it -- is part of a general pedagogic approach sometimes called 'do first'. It works well for many students, although of course we're all different, and some do really want to understand the theory behind what they're doing as they do it, which is fine too.

The second point is more controversial. It's very important that you should have some guidance as a beginner because it's easy to develop bad habits that seem to help when playing very simple material but soon become a problem when you try to develop further. This is one of the primary reasons why people fail to develop beyond this point: bad habits trhey adopted early on are holding them back, and they're too ingrained to un-learn. With that said, unless you have a lot of patience and discipline you'll find that an intense focus on technical details is likely to make getting started even harder than it needs to be. Contrary to what some people seem to believe, guitar technique starts out pretty "fluid" and minor adjustments can be made later with relatively little pain.

Advancing Beginner

After a few months of regular practice the rank beginner should have made good progress against most of the goals listed above, but will need a considerable amount of consolidation before they feel confident. At this stage you're an Advancing Beginner making your way securely towards the next level.

This poses a number of challenges, but the most important is to stay interested in practicing without trying to go to far too quickly. Realistic goals at this point are:

• Expand your knowledge of chords by learning songs that have some new chords in them (e.g. sus2 and sus4, major 7, diminished and half-diminished)
• In particular, learn the F major chord with a full bar and learn to move it up the neck (this involves learning the names of the notes on the E string)
• Work out the chord changes to some simple songs by ear
• Develop your repertoire of strumming patterns and styles
• Learn some famous riffs that use power chords and single notes
• Learn some basic fingerpicking patterns
• Expand your musical horizons by listening to some different kinds of music

Of these the second is an absolute requirement for moving on. As long as you're enjoying yourself you might stay at this level until you've been playing for about twelve months altogether: there's no need to rush this stage.

Intermediate

As with beginners, I think it's useful to break intermediate players down into two groups: the Beginning Intermediate stage and the Advancing Intermediate that follows it. The first is a bit like the Rank Beginner stage: there's plenty of new stuff to learn. The second is more like the Advancing Beginner, whose job is to consolidate and expand this new material.

Beginning Intermediate

The player who's ready to move beyond the Advancing Beginner stage is becoming the sort of player that people think of as quite competent, who can whip out the guitar at a party and entertain people with a song. The next step requires you to step back and develop some of that theoretical knowledge that we've mostly been avoiding. While doing that, of course, the Basic Intermediate player can continue developing as an Advancing Beginner, too; the edges of the two stages are always very blurred.

Here your goals become:

• Understand some very basic music theory: pitch, key and triadic harmony
• Be able to identify notes in the chord fingerings you already know as root, third, fifth and so on
• Learn the B♭ full bar fingering, and how to move it on the neck
• Memorise all the notes on the neck
• Learn the minor pentatonic scale across the whole neck and be able to play it in any key
• Hence begin to improvise very simple blues solos

There's a lot of learning and memorizing to do here, so it's important to mix this up with some fun stuff. The good news is that progress with this stage can be very fast: it can be done in 12 weeks with enough application, although again there's really no need to rush it.

The last part -- beginning to play some basic solos -- can of course take as long as you want. The key word is begin: we're not aiming at mastery here but at getting started on a road you'll continue to travel for the rest of your life, or at least as long as you play guitar.

The minor pentatonic and the blues solo are a classic way to start single-note playing, and almost all guitarists understand and enjoy playing this kind of music even if it isn't their ultimate goal to play in this style. Some students will inevitably dislike it strongly, in which case another scale and style may be considered. The point is that the scale should not have too many notes in it (a pentatonic of some kind is great for this) and there should be no necessity for the student to change scales during a solo.

Advancing Intermediate

It's at this point that most guitarists will feel as if they might be of some use in a band, and finding other people to play with besides their teacher is of significant benefit. Many guitarists stop somewhere around here for a long period, even never developing past this point. That's OK if you're enjoying your music and you don't want or need to do anything different.

If you do, the next stage is what I call Advancing Intermediate: you're a solid intermediate player but you want more. What this "more" is depends on your style of music, but it might include:

• Learning more movable chord shapes
• Developing more advanced rhythmic ideas (e.g. syncopation, accents)
• Learning the major scale and its modes (and making sure you properly understand the idea of a mode)
• Deepening your knowledge of the repertoire of one or more musical styles
• Developing as a soloist through listening, learning and analysing licks and transcribing simple solos
• Working on technical exercises for specific areas that need improvement
• Deepen your knowledge of music theory
• Expand your musical horizons by discovering more musicians in styles you enjoy playing as well as entirely new kinds of music

How far all this goes depends on you, and what it consists of depends on your own style -- players of folk, jazz and metal, say, need to learn quite different things at this point.

Advanced

Once you've been working at the Advancing Intermediate level for a while you're likely to start to find that you're not only fairly competent, you're actually better than most guitarists you know. You have a strong theoretical foundation, a solid technique and can, at least in fairly simple cases, sight-read, improvise, transcribe and memorize music as needed. You know a lot about music, and your ears are well-developed. You're an advanced guitarist.

At this stage anything can happen: it really depends on where you are and where you want to get to. There are no recipes for that, I'm afraid, and you'll have to work it out, either on your own or with a teacher.

Practice

The answer to the question, "How do I get better?" is, of course, "Practice!" If only it were that simple. The trouble is, as most guitar teachers will tell you, students find practice difficult. They find it hard to know what to practice, when and how often.

Content

Practice time is limited for most of us, so what you practice must be limited too; the key to improving is repetition and, for most of us, that means planning and being organised. Practice what you want to get better at, obviously, but also make sure you have some time just to play music. You'll soon lose interest if all your guitar time is taken up with mindless exercises.

Try to break your practice time up into several parts, such as learning new things, exercises and playing stuff you enjoy. Have specific goals for each week about what you want to learn or be able to do, and make sure they're realistic and that you'll have some way of knowing when you've achieved them. Keep track of what you're working on in a notebook -- that helps you to see your progress, too.

If you're doing exercises you will almost certainly want to use a metronome. Try to break your record every few days, but don't push the metronome up too fast or all you'll learn is how to play really sloppily and make lots of mistakes.

Frequency

Practice every day that you can. Don't wait until the weekend and then have a marathon practice session: pick your guitar up every day. Even extremely busy people usually find they can get up a bit earlier or stay up a bit later to fit some practice time in. It doesn't have to be a lot, but it does have to be often.

Play when you're physically and mentally capable of doing so. Don't get up at 6am to practice if you're not a morning person; you'll spend the time drooping over your guitar craving coffee, and you'll give up after about a week. Be realistic, and if necessary be creative: could you, for example, take a guitar into work and find a place to practice at lunchtime?

Duration

You need a certain amount of time for a practice session to be effective: 5 minutes isn't enough, because it takes that long just to warm up and settle into it. I usually recommend 20 minutes for a Rank Beginner, 30-45 minutes for Advancing Beginners and an hour or more for players working at higher levels.

If you have the time and the determination you can practice 10 hours a day (as in Steve Vai's famous workout), but that usually has to be organised properly and you need to take plenty of breaks. It depends how ambitious you are: certainly the more you practice the better you'll get at what you practice. Just make sure you don't practice making mistakes (see above).

Do separate "practice" from "mucking about on the guitar", which is a different but also important activity. Practice is the time when you work in a focussed way on specific things you want to get better at.

Intensity

Finally, a word of warning. It's possible that "no pain, no gain" works in the gym, but in the music room it's absolutely wrong. It's quite possible to practice until your fingers ache or you feel shooting pains in your arms, or to "play 'til you bleed". This is not wise.

Playing guitar isn't like lifting weights; it involves very small, very fast, very repetititve movements. Doing these over and over again does build muscle, and especially builds muscle memory. But doing them until it hurts can cause permanent damage. Tendonitis is painful and will stop you playing for a singificant time; RSI and carpal tunnel can put a permanent end not only to your guitar playing but to plenty of other things, too.

The key here is to practice in a relaxed way and pay attention to cramps or other discomforts. If you want to develop a strong technique you have to practice many thousands of repetitions over extended periods. If you're practicing at a high intensity make sure you break it up, change positions regularly, use short rests to recover and learn some stretching exercises. If you do this you should never have any problem worse than the occasional blister.

Working with Others

Music isn't, for most people, a lonely activity. Music wants to be heard, and musicians like to play together. You will benefit from playing with other people in various ways at different stages of your development.

Lessons

Working with a teacher can help you at any stage, even at the most advanced levels. It's not always necessary, and you may find you can make progress for a long time without taking any lessons at all. It's when you're stuck, or when you want to make quicker progress, that a teacher comes in handy.

A "Study Buddy"

I know the phrase is cheesy, but it's really useful if you can get together with a friend who's at a similar level to you. You can swap different things you've learned and help each other out with things you're finding difficult.

Playing with another person is a skill, and developing that skill is important. It's something your teacher can help you with to some degree, but a teacher isn't really the best person for this because they're not at your level.

Jamming

Once you're somewhere around the Advancing Beginner / Beginning Intermediate level you should have the skills necessary to form or join a band. It might not be a very good band, and it might not ever play in front of an audience, but it's an amazing experience the first time you do it and it's capable of transforming your playing. Whether you're jamming some blues songs, trying to work out cover versions or even writing your own stuff, working with a band is a key part of most musicians' formative experience. Do it before you think you're ready.