Every week, another YouTube video promises “the exercise that will transform your playing.” A new speed drill. A new finger independence pattern. A new scale sequence that some guy with close to a million subscribers swears changed everything for him.
So you try it. You add it to the pile of exercises you’re already working on. And a month later, you’ve collected a dozen different drills from a dozen different sources — and you’re not noticeably better at the thing you actually sat down to improve.
This is one of the most common problems I see. Guitarists drowning in exercises that have nothing to do with what they’re actually trying to learn.
The Exercise Collection Trap
Here’s what usually happens. You’re working on a solo and you get stuck on a fast passage near the end. So you go looking for help on how to fix your technique. You find a speed exercise on YouTube. You start practicing it. It feels productive because your fingers are moving and you’re building some muscle memory.
But here’s the problem — that exercise uses completely different notes, different patterns, and different string crossings than the passage you’re stuck on. You’re training your hands to do something, but it’s not the thing you need them to do. It’s like studying French vocabulary to prepare for a Russian language test. The effort is real. The results don’t transfer.
Meanwhile, the time you spent on that random exercise is time you didn’t spend on the actual passage that’s giving you trouble.
Build Exercises From What You're Working On
The fix is simpler than most people expect. Instead of hunting for exercises online, create them from the material you’re already trying to learn.
Stuck on a fast passage? Isolate just those measures or even just a few notes. Slow them way down — half speed, even quarter speed. Loop them with a metronome. Play the passage with only your picking hand to see what’s actually happening there. Most guitarists spend all their time watching their fretting hand because that’s where the visible action is. Shift your attention to the picking hand and you’ll often find the real problem — a string skipping that’s inefficient, a pick angle that’s off, tension you didn’t know was there. Can you play the pick pattern on muted strings correctly? This will show you if your picking hand knows what it is supposed to do without relying on the fretting hand for cues.
Once you’ve identified the specific issue, you can build a short exercise around just that movement. Now you’re practicing something that directly improves the thing you’re trying to play. Every rep counts. Nothing is wasted.
This works for anything — chord transitions, strumming patterns, improvisation vocabulary. If you’re working on making a strumming pattern feel automatic, practice that pattern at different tempos. Mix up the order of the rhythm — there are four beats, so move the rhythms around to create variations. This speeds up the process of learning rhythm overall. Record yourself and listen back. Identify where the timing breaks down and work on just that. The exercise comes from the music you want to play, not from a stranger on the internet.
The "Why" Test
Before you add anything to your practice routine, ask yourself two questions: “Why am I practicing this?” and “What specific skill will it improve?”
If you can’t answer both clearly, skip it.
This sounds obvious, but most guitarists never do it. They see an exercise, it looks cool or challenging, and they start working on it without ever asking whether it connects to anything they’re actually trying to accomplish. A week later, they’ve added new exercises to their routine and dropped nothing. Their practice time is spread thinner, they’re making less progress on everything, and they feel busier than ever without getting better.
The “Why” test keeps your practice honest. Every exercise earns its spot or it doesn’t make the cut.
The ‘Why’ test keeps your practice honest. Every exercise earns its spot or it doesn’t make the cut.
This is also where an experienced teacher makes a big difference. Most guitarists can’t objectively evaluate their own playing — they don’t know what they don’t know. A good teacher can watch you play for a few minutes, identify exactly what’s holding you back, and build a practice plan around that. No wasted time diagnosing the wrong problem or coming up with an exercise that doesn’t actually fix it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Say you have 30 minutes to practice. You could spend it on five different exercises you found online — six minutes each, none of them connected to each other, all of them partially learned, none of them finished.
Or you could spend it like this: five minutes on the specific passage or technique that’s your current priority, five minutes on a secondary skill that supports it, and five minutes playing something you enjoy. Now repeat everything a second time. At the end of the week, you’ve spent real time on a real goal. You can hear the difference.
The students I work with who make the fastest progress aren’t the ones with the longest practice sessions or the biggest exercise libraries. They’re the ones who practice fewer things with more focus and resist the temptation to chase every new drill that shows up in their feed.
It's Not About Doing More
The internet has convinced a lot of guitarists that the path to improvement is more — more exercises, more techniques, more hours. It’s systems like CAGED that make sense on the surface but slow you down by making things more confusing than they need to be. Adding more unfocused material to your routine doesn’t make you better. It makes you busy.
The real question isn’t “what else should I be practicing?” It’s “am I practicing the right things, and am I practicing them well?”
About The Author
Brian Fish is a professional guitarist who has been dedicated to helping other guitar players in Northeast Ohio pursue their musical dreams since 1994. He’s passionate about guiding others on their musical journey! He is the Guitar Playing Transformation Specialist, instructor, mentor, trainer, and coach at
Guitar Lessons Geauga.
Brian has also assisted people from around the globe in developing a solid sense of timing and enhancing their creativity through the fantastic rhythm course, “Ultimate Rhythm Mastery,” available at MusicTheoryForGuitar.com.
If you live in Geauga County / North East Ohio, Guitar Lessons Geauga can help you become the player you’ve always wanted to be.