Making music brings so much joy.

It reduces stress and improves your mental health.

But it’s so hard to fit guitar practice into your busy schedule.

Here are three strategies that help:

1. Tempt Y...

Picture this.

You’re excited about learning a new piece of music.

You begin playing it.

But the mistakes start coming.

And they don’t stop.

You put more time into practicing the piece.

But it do...

When you first learn about the minor scale, it seems simple.

But then someone says there are three forms of minor scales.

These are natural minor, harmonic minor, and melodic minor.

What?

Let me e...

Your left-hand fingers can’t reach the notes of some chords you want to play.

Notes buzz or are muffled because your fingers seem too short.

How do you fix this?

First, check whether your guitar is...

The fretboard can seem like a mystery.

You try memorizing scale and chord patterns.

But you’re not sure what notes you’re playing.

While knowing fingering patterns is useful, it’s important to go f...

It’s hard to play the right notes and rhythms consistently.

You keep playing through a piece from the beginning.

Sometimes you get it right.

Sometimes you get it wrong.

How do you get it right eve...

Perhaps playing guitar for an audience causes fear. Maybe even nausea.

For many years, this was how I felt.

The person who did the most to transform my thinking about performance anxiety was Pepe Ro...

You’re enchanted by the ability of classical guitar to play two voices at once on the same instrument.

But when you start playing a piece with two separate voices, it’s harder than you expected.

How...

When you first encounter dotted rhythms, they can seem so difficult.

A dot adds half the value of the note it follows.

So a dotted eighth note is equal to an eighth note plus a sixteenth note.

But ...

Picture this.

You’re playing a beautiful piece of music, but suddenly you hit a wall.

It’s a chord switch that stops you in your tracks.

You freeze.

Your fingers get confused and end up in the wro...

You want to play without looking at the page.

You think you have the piece memorized.

But then you have a memory slip and lose confidence.

Is it possible to trust your memorization?

These four ste...

Most guitarists dislike note reading.

But what makes it so challenging to read standard notation on guitar?

1. Little Visual Relationship

When looking at staff notation, there’s little visual relat...