How should you spend your guitar practice time? That depends on where you want to go — but one thing is universal: don’t practice stuff you’re already good at. Colin’s been teaching for decades, and in this guitar practice tips lesson, he lays out a practical framework for making every minute count.

Practice What You’re Weak At

This is the most important principle and the one most players ignore. If your chord changes are sloppy, that’s where your time goes. If your picking hand can’t keep up, that’s the priority. Identify what’s holding you back and put your energy there — not into the riff you can already play in your sleep.

Colin describes his own approach as extremely creative. Every day is different. If he’s learning a new song, he’ll listen to it in the car on the way to the studio, then work on the specific riffs or chord movements that give him trouble. He doesn’t try to nail the whole thing in one session — he takes it in small, digestible pieces.

Warm Up With Scales

Scale practice is the ideal warm-up. Colin uses a chromatic scale to get his fingers moving and his picking hand coordinated, starting slow and gradually picking up speed with a metronome or drum machine. Digital time references beat the old wind-up metronomes — those pendulum styles go uneven if the surface isn’t perfectly level.

For Colin, 45 minutes is the bare minimum to get connected with his guitar — feeling the strings, the pick, the instrument. That warm-up phase transitions naturally into the real work. If your finger dexterity needs building, spend a bigger portion of your time on scales. That work directly improves chord accuracy and hand strength too.

Break It Into Chunks

Balance structured work with time to just noodle on the guitar — that free-form exploration is where musical ideas come from. Don’t try to swallow the whole cow in one dinner — that’s Colin’s analogy, and it’s a good one. If you’re learning a song, work the first few bars of a solo until they feel comfortable. Then add the next section. If you’re working on chord changes, take them in groups rather than running through the entire progression over and over.

Your three hours of practice (Colin’s recommendation for anyone serious about the instrument) don’t need to happen all at once. Split it into sections based on your concentration level. Even thirty minutes of focused work moves you forward. Zakk Wylde summed it up well: some days he gets six hours, some days he gets ten minutes, but on those ten-minute days, he figures he’s ten minutes better than he was yesterday.

Practice Without Your Guitar

Some of the best practice happens away from the instrument. Listen to the song you’re learning while driving. Call out the chord changes as they happen. Sing the riffs you’re trying to learn. If you can sing a melody, you can play it — the ear-to-finger connection works both ways.

You can even write out a chord chart while listening and point to each change as it happens in the song. That mental rehearsal primes your brain for the physical work when you do pick up the guitar.

Eliminate Distractions

Don’t watch unrelated YouTube videos during practice. Don’t scroll your phone. Put yourself in a room where nobody’s going to interrupt you, even if it’s only for ten minutes. Focused, undistracted practice is worth five times more than half-attentive noodling with the TV on.

Structure your time around what you need most. If dexterity is the bottleneck, lean into scales. If you need songs for a gig, prioritize your setlist. And if you want to develop creativity, set aside time for unstructured play — that builds musicianship that drills alone can’t touch.