Five Hidden Practice Mistakes That Hold Guitarists Back

Stuck practicing the same riffs and wondering why your playing won’t budge? We dig into the real reasons progress stalls and share a step-by-step way to turn scattered effort into steady gains. This isn’t about buying another pedal or memorizing another scale shape. It’s about practicing with intention, tightening your groove, and building a system that exposes weaknesses, connects skills, and keeps you accountable with honest feedback.

We start by reframing practice. Instead of vague goals like “work on scales,” we zero in on specific, measurable tasks: connect pentatonic positions one and two on the top strings, at a set tempo, for a short, focused block. Then we shift to rhythm and feel. Most players overtrain the fretting hand and undertrain the picking or strumming hand, so we break down subdivision choices, dynamic accents, and pocket control over backing tracks. From there, we get candid about weak spots and how to find them—whether they’re technical, theoretical, or visual—using short drills, tuner-checked bends, metronome grids, and targeted transitions.

We also unpack why learning songs often fails and how to fix it with a three-part model: know the roadmap by ear, own the tools under your fingers, and lock the groove before stitching sections together. Finally, we make the case for regular assessments and constructive feedback to eliminate blind spots, along with a healthier approach to comparison that fuels growth without crushing confidence. By the end, you’ll have a clear framework to focus your sessions, play tighter, and turn practice time into real musical results.

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Links:

Check out the GuitarZoom Academy:
https://academy.guitarzoom.com/

• Steve’s Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/stinemus...
• GuitarZoom Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarz0...
• Songs Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarSo... .

Chapters

• 1:10 Why Practice Feels Stuck
• 1:36 Practice With Clear Intention
• 3:38 Rhythm, Groove, And The Picking Hand
• 6:12 Identifying And Fixing Weak Spots
• 7:32 Connecting Skills To Play Songs
• 11:14 Get Feedback And Regular Assessments
• 11:14 Overcoming Harmful Comparison
• 13:06 Recap And Guitar Zoom Invitation

Transcript

Steve: 0:35

Have you ever felt like no matter how much you practice, it feels like you're just kind of spinning your wheels and you're not really getting anywhere? The thing is, most guitar players aren't stuck because of what they're doing. They're stuck because of invisible habits that keep holding them back. What I'd like to do is break down five of the biggest ones that I think would really help you in moving yourself forward. The first thing I want to talk to you about is what I call intention. Practicing with intention. Okay. When you go to practice, you might be thinking, okay, what I really need to work on is uh movement between the positions or or the strings, for instance. And you start doing that, and all of a sudden you find yourself like fundamentally practicing each position, or, you know, I really want to work on my string bending. That's what I need to focus on. My intention needs to be working on my bending. And maybe my vibrato or something like that. And as you do that, all of a sudden you find yourself noodling. The most important thing is when you tell yourself, what is it that I want to work on today, right now, whatever it is, what is my intention? What does my focus need to be? Not just, I need to practice my scales or I need to practice my technique. What do you need to practice? What do you need to practice about your scales? You might have 10 different things about your scales that you need to practice, and that's okay. But practicing with intention tells you today or right now, what I need to focus on is this. This is what I need to work on. Okay. Not just macro, I need to get better at my scales or something like that. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. That's fine if it's working for you, but if it's not, you need to zoom in and say, what is it that I really need to focus on? I need to focus on connecting my strings. I want to focus today. My focus is going to be connecting position one of the pentatonic to position two of the pentatonic. And how am I going to do that? Well, maybe what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on moving between the two positions. Maybe what I'm going to do is I'm just going to focus on moving between these positions on the first and second strings only. You know, there's lots of different ways that you can learn to practice with intention, but it's it's getting out of this generalization. Number two is the importance of rhythm and groove. Okay, so often we get, you know, into this thing where we're learning theory and scales and modes and arpeggios and all these things, and that's great. Again, nothing wrong with it. Resources or tools that you're learning. I never think there's anything wrong with them. The thing you have to ask yourself is when's the best time to be working on these things? And so often what people focus on is what the fretting hand is doing, and they don't think enough about what the uh picking or strumming hand is doing. So it's important to learn to really separate your strumming, for instance. If that's what you're trying to work on, is your strumming. Work on, you know, techniques like scratching or whatever it might be independently and focus on the tightness and the accuracy of your rhythm. Focus on the dynamics of your rhythm. The same thing is going to happen when you're dealing with single note picking. Like if you're playing over a backing track, don't just focus on, you know, moving around and whatever. Again, play with intention. What am I trying to work on? What I often do is try and get people, get students to focus on their groove. So when they listen to, for instance, a backing track and they're trying to learn how to solo. We talk about, for instance, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth note, and how that's kind of the bread and butter of improvisation of soloing. But that means when you hear a groove, and you get in there, boo-da-dum, bum, dun, ba-do-da, do, bump, bump, ba-da-da-da-dun. You know, do you have the skills to be able to do that? Do you have the creativeness in your head to be able to think of those sorts of things? But once all of that is is is planned out, do you have the ability to be able to connect very tightly to that groove, to that rhythm when you're playing? Again, maybe it's a little slower or faster, or, you know, the groove is this, or, you know, the style of music is this. All of those kinds of things are variables. But working on your tightness of your groove, of your strumming, of your picking, being able to find where that quarter, eighth, sixteenth note thing lives, and then being able to play very much in the pocket of what that is, is really, really important. More than just a lick that you're playing or a pattern that you're learning or something like that. And there's a host of different ways that you can learn how to do that. But be aware of that. For me, that's that's mistake number two. So, number one, if you think about practicing with intention, sometimes what your goal should be is number two, I need to really try and focus on my groove over this backing track or playing along with this song. I really need to focus on trying to create a rhythm that really locks in. For me, mistake number three would be avoiding weaknesses. Oftentimes when we grab the guitar and we quote unquote noodle, we're we're working on things that we've done before. And again, there's nothing wrong with that reinforcement. I think that's wonderful. Okay. But we need to focus on our problem spots too. Like where are my valleys in my playing? Where are the dips in my playing, my weak spots, so I can try and get those start to start elevating to kind of reach these other things that I'm working on. You've got to find a balance in that. And if you think about again, the the intention of your practice, you can try and start trying to figure out where those problems are and start, you know, again, elevating those. Sometimes the problem is you don't know what you don't know. You don't know where the weak spots are. And uh, you know, that's a that's a big problem. And so we need to figure out well, where are those weak spots and what do we need to be able to do to start building or mending those so they can start, you know, increasing in skill set to sort of, you know, balance out the things that you're already good at with these things that you're not so good at. Sometimes they're physical things, sometimes they're conceptual things, you know, maybe it's a theoretical thing or a visual thing that you're struggling with. But those weaknesses, it's important that we suss out those weaknesses and figure out what we need to do with those. Mistake number four for me is missing the bigger picture of connecting skills together. So, for instance, a very easy example of this would be um maybe a particular student is saying, I want to learn how to play songs, but every time I try and play along, it fails. Like I just can't play along, or I get lost, or I don't know where I'm at. Again, it's it's breaking down the pieces and independently working on those and then bringing them back collectively so they can work together. Okay. So a song, for instance, for me, I always think of a song as having kind of three points. Okay, three, like a triangle. One point is the song itself. Like, do I know how the song goes? Am I am I able to, you know, listen to the song enough to get to where the point is where I know, okay, it's in the verse, and here comes the bridge, or here comes the chorus, and there's this little weird thing here that they do, a breakdown or something, and then it comes back into the song. Like, the more I can listen to the song and get used to kind of the bigger picture, the overarching picture of what this song is doing. Not just, oh, I gotta learn this song, so let me grab a chord chart and whatever, but actually getting to know the song, becoming comfortable with that song as a musician. Part two of that would be well, what components do I need to play this song? Once I've got this song in my head and I'm listening to it and all that kind of stuff. Now I start doing some research and figure out, well, I need this chord and this chord and this chord or you know, this lick or whatever it might be. These are the tools that I need, and these are the things that I need to work on with my fretting hand. Am I capable of doing those? Is there a you know a disconnect somewhere between the movement of the G and the C chord or being able to pick this thing, whatever it might be? So those are the tools. The third part is the rhythm, the strumming, the picking, whatever those things are that I need to be able to do, the groove, which we just talked about before. For me, I try and teach people to independently break those things down. Don't just try and jump in, and because you've been working on G and C and D or something like that, you hope this whole thing works. If it does, that's great. But if it doesn't, at least somewhere along your journey, instead of just saying, well, I suck, I can't do this, what we need to do is figure out, well, where's the where's the disconnect? Right? Why isn't this working? So that way we can understand that playing a song isn't just this, it's actually little pieces that we have to learn how to do independently and then build them back up together. For me, mistake number five is very important. Not getting feedback, not getting assessments of your playing. Are you progressing? You know, are things getting better? Where are the problem spots? All of those things, being able to get regular assessments of your playing, you know, without fear or, you know, worry about judgment, getting somebody that can say, look, I want to see you play so I can tell you what you're doing right, and I can also give you some suggestions on the things that that we might be able to do to optimize some of these things that you're doing. Okay. You don't know what you don't know. You can't fix what you can't hear. You know, we all have blind spots. And so to get assessment from someone else that maybe has been in this situation um, you know, before and would know more about this, to be able to look and say, you know, send me a video, let me see what you're doing, or let me watch you play. You know, we're on Zoom or something, let me watch you play, let me, you know, hear you play over this backing track or whatever it might be, and let me give you some suggestions of some things that I think would help you. The more regular assessments of your playing, the more feedback you can get, the more you can continually optimize what it is that you're trying to do. One bonus mistake that I'd like to talk about is quite simply just comparison. You know, getting lost in this world of I'm never gonna be good enough. The people I see on YouTube are always doing this, or you know, whatever it might be, or I'll never, I'll never be good enough. You know, I love Steve Ray Von, but I'll never be able to play like that, or you know, I'll never be able to play in a band. First of all, you got to give yourself some grace. Second of all, is comparison can be beneficial to a certain point, but very detrimental if you go beyond that. You know, your your goals, your journey, your progress is yours, you know, it's learning who you are and what your issues are, where your struggles are, and then being able to fix that and optimize that journey to get you to the next level, to get you where you want to go. If you start developing a sense of confidence in yourself through your comfortability of your fretboard in whatever way that that, you know, that pertains to you, that's where all of a sudden you start getting to another level of playing because you're not worried about what everybody else is thinking, or I'll never be able to do this. Maybe you won't. I don't know. I I don't know anything about your personal journey, but I do know that so often when I talk to people, they're just completely limiting that limiting themselves because you know, they're they're so hard on themselves and they don't see what they don't see. Again, because they don't see the bigger picture, they don't see that they might only be three or four steps off from where they want to go. They just don't know that any of these things exist. So when they practice, they're always practicing sort of the um, for lack of a better term, the wrong things, you know, the same old, same old, the noodling, whatever it is, instead of developing these problem spots. So you got to be careful with comparison. So to recap this, think about this. I want you to learn to practice with intention. I want you want you to build your rhythm and your groove skills. Okay. Deal with your weaknesses, not just the things that you're good at, okay? Learn to connect your skills together, understand how to break them apart and then build them so they can come back together and work. Um, assessments, feedback are very much important. And the last thing for me is just be careful with that comparison thing. Now, for you, if any of these things hit home, what I want you to do is check out the Guitar Zoom Academy, okay? It's designed to fix these exact things. We work together, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, working on all of these things, getting you structure, getting you feedback. You work with a community that has your back and is excited, you know, very motivated. But we're working together daily. Like we're we're constantly working together to get you where you need to go. So do me a favor stay positive, keep practicing, and I'll see you in the next lesson, okay?