Practice routine
You may find it helpful to develop a warm-up routine when you pick up the guitar. Before you pick up the guitar to play, gently stretch the fingers on both hands and roll the wrists, elbows and shoulders a little. When you then start to play, run some scales to stretch and warm up the fingers. Some good stretching exercises can be found
here and
here.
It’s useful to have some structure to a practice routine. Here are some ideas you might find useful:-
- Play some scales, arpeggios or licks you already know, incorporate some new ones, try some that you know in different parts of the fretboard.
- Practise old and new chords. For chords that you already know, learn different positions for them on the fretboard. Practise rhythm playing, strumming, timing, etc. Play progressions that use a mixture of open and barre chords (Hotel California is a good example). Here is a good lesson on changing between chords.
- Practise techniques such as bends, vibrato, harmonics, tapping, muting, etc
- Improvise and record yourself over a backing track (Some Backing Tracks can be found here). Listen to previous recordings and listen for the parts that sound good and the parts that don’t. Try to understand why they sound good i.e. what intervals were you playing? Which notes over which chords?
- Train your ear and practise some theory, try to work out some solos and chord progressions from your favourite songs (some useful theory information can be found here and here).
After practising though, make sure you leave time to actually play the guitar. This would be unstructured time where you noodle about, play your favourite pieces and basically just have great fun. This is, after all, the reason we pick up the instrument in the first place.