You can still make progress with only 15 minutes of guitar practice. The catch is what you do with those 15 minutes, and it's less than you'd think. So little that it's almost laughable.
Guitarists drastically overestimate what they can achieve in one session. But they drastically underestimate how a little bit of practice compounds over a few weeks, or even a few months. Here's how to use a short session properly, with examples for different kinds of practice.
Go deep on something tiny ▶ 0:16
The idea is simple. Pick a tiny piece of music, or a tiny piece of your practice routine, and do nothing else for those 15 minutes.
At the end, assuming you can stick at it, one of two things will happen. You'll make progress on that small thing and put the guitar down satisfied. Or, and I'd be willing to bet this is more likely, you'll make progress and go, "Hang on, I want to keep going now."
Drop the all-or-nothing mindset ▶ 1:06
So many musicians, hobbyists and professionals alike, myself included, far too often have an all-or-nothing mindset. "If I can't practise for three hours, what's the point?"
You can't get loads done in 15 minutes. But you can get enough done that you still make progress. And it means that when you do sit down for an hour or two, when you actually have the time and the motivation, you can really delve into what you've been working on in those little sessions.
Scales and technique: two or three strings ▶ 1:38
Say you're working on playing your G major scale a little faster. I don't even want you to play the whole scale. At most, pick two or three strings of it, ideally the part where you mess up most often, and that's all you run.
For example, you might pick the A and D strings because the fingering switches there: first, second and fourth finger on one string, then first, third and fourth finger on the next. That little switchover is a bit tricky, so that's what you work on, up and back down.
I timed myself going back and forth over a section like this for just 15 seconds. Naturally, you'll pause in places and you won't loop it perfectly. But even on the optimistic side, multiply that out to 15 minutes and it's a huge number of repetitions.
Tell me that you can't practise it that many times and make at least a little bit of progress.
Riffs: half a bar at most ▶ 2:54
The same goes for a piece of music. Say you're working on a riff. I don't want you to play a whole bar of it. I want you to play half a bar. Maybe just four notes, eight notes at most. We're taking trivially small amounts of music and playing them on repeat, with focus. Fifteen minutes of nothing else.
Take the riff to Mr. Crowley. The whole thing is actually quite a long part. So you could just play the first chord, do the little pull-off, and go back to the first chord again.
Even that has plenty to work on. When you go from the chord to the note on the A string, that note needs to be the only thing ringing out. So as you hit the A string, you need to mute every other string: the higher strings with your fretting hand, and the low E string with your thumb. It's not as easy as it sounds. If you struggle with muting, that alone is easily 15 minutes of practice, and I'd be very surprised if you don't get at least a little better at it in that time.
Chord changes: one change on repeat ▶ 4:20
Say you're working on your C to D chord change. You just work on that one change, on repeat.
If you're not super comfortable with your chords, you might not cycle through it that quickly, and you still need to think about what you're doing and assess how you're playing. But you're getting the reps in. Think how many times you could go C to D in a minute, unbroken. Probably quite a lot. Multiply that by 15.
You might think that's only one chord change, and you're right. But it'll make you slightly better at the next one. And when you work on that one, you get slightly better at the one after. Over a week or two you realise you've worked on seven, eight, nine or ten chord changes, and you've covered a lot of ground with only 15 minutes a day.
Improv: one idea, many ways ▶ 5:12
For improvisation, take one guitar lick, one portion of a scale, or one technique you're working on, and play it in as many interesting ways as you can in 15 minutes.
You're not trying to be too musical here. You're trying to take one idea and develop it. Obviously, if you play the same lick for 15 minutes, anyone listening is going to be bored as hell. That's not the point. When you go back to improvising more freely, that lick becomes part of your wider range of ideas, because you've practised it so intensively.
Why it compounds ▶ 5:51
Don't underestimate how much this adds up over a month. If you focus on a tiny portion of a song but do a different little portion every day, you might have half the song in a month's time. You might have the whole thing.
If you try to do the whole song in 15 minutes instead, you'll probably only get three or four attempts at it. And you won't get any chance to dial in your focus on the part that actually needs attention.
You can scale this up as far as you like. If you've got half an hour, take the same approach and still focus on one thing. Maybe a slightly longer passage, but one thing.
It fixes motivation, not just time ▶ 6:35
Here's the cool thing. If you do this as described, you'll have made some progress by the end of the 15 minutes, and you'll probably want to keep playing. You might go on for another 15 minutes, or another 45, because you're actually seeing progress.
For most people, it's not really a time issue. It's a motivation issue. This gives you an immediate win, and it's a legitimate one. You're not pretending. You have got a bit better at the instrument. And if you genuinely are short of time and need to go and do something else, you've still made progress and you can come back the next day feeling like you've achieved something.
So pick one tiny thing for tomorrow: two strings of a scale, half a bar of a riff, or one chord change. Set a timer for 15 minutes, do only that, and log it in your practice log so you can see it add up.
