Your practice plan for after the class ends
Last time we played for other people without our hands shaking off the pick, more or less. This is the last lesson in the module, and honestly the most important one, because in a week or two the class ends and it's just you and the guitar and whatever habits you decided to keep.
So let's talk about what you actually do at home, starting the week after this class is over.
You don't need a hundred songs
I'll say my opinion straight out: I'd rather you play four songs clean than forty songs sloppy. The guy who knows four songs well and plays them steady is more fun at a campfire than the guy who half-knows forty. Nobody's grading you on quantity. Pick the handful of songs you actually like, the ones you'd play again on purpose, and let those be your real repertoire. Everything else you learned in this class was practice for getting those four or five songs solid.
That's not me lowering the bar. It's me telling you where the bar actually is.
A practice plan that fits in real life
Here's what I'd do, and what I do:
Fifteen to twenty minutes, most days, beats one long session on Saturday. Your hands and your ear both need repetition more than they need marathon sessions. A house with an acoustic guitar leaning in the corner where you walk by it gets played. A guitar in a case in a closet does not.
Start every session with something you already know. Don't open with the hard thing. Open with the easy thing that reminds your hands they know how to do this. Two minutes, maybe three.
Then spend the middle on the thing that's still a little wrong. Slow, with the metronome if the trouble is timing, without it if the trouble is a chord shape. One thing at a time. If you try to fix your barre chord AND your strumming pattern AND your fingerpicking thumb all in the same five minutes, you'll fix none of them. Pick one.
End with the song you love, played all the way through, mistakes and all. Don't stop and fix things in this last pass. Just play it like you'd play it for somebody. That's the muscle you're actually building — not perfection, but finishing.
The four-songs afternoon
I want to tell you about a Saturday a while back. Heather and I drove up American Fork Canyon, no particular reason, just to get out of the apartment and see some trees that weren't in a parking lot. I brought the guitar along for no reason I could've explained at the time.
We found a spot, sat down, and I played. Not because anybody asked. Not because I was working on anything. I just played the four songs I actually know all the way through, and Heather sat there next to me, and the canyon got dark around us a little at a time.
That's the whole memory. Four songs and the light going. But I think about it more than I think about most of the technical stuff I've learned. That's what the practicing is actually for. It's not for the recital that never happens. It's for the Saturday you didn't plan, when you've got a guitar and somebody you like and four songs that are ready when you are.
You won't get there by chasing more songs. You get there by making the ones you have solid enough that you're not thinking about them anymore.
A plain caution
If you're setting up a regular practice spot at home, watch your posture, especially if you're sitting on a couch or a low chair for twenty minutes at a stretch. Guitar players get sore wrists and stiff necks from bad setups, not from playing too much. A chair with some back support and your foot up on something if you play classical-style will save you grief later. It's not dramatic, it just adds up over months if you ignore it.
And if the guitar itself is fighting you — strings feel too hard to press, especially past the fifth fret — get the action checked before you decide it's your hands. I've said this before in class and I'll keep saying it because I believe it: a bad setup has quit more beginners than a lack of talent ever has.
Keep meeting up if you can
A few of you have talked about starting an informal group, meeting once a month just to play together. I think that's a heck yes idea. You don't need a teacher in the room for that. You just need a few people willing to be bad in front of each other occasionally, which is most of what this whole class has been about anyway.
My dad played piano badly but often, his whole life, and he's the reason I ever picked up an instrument at all. He never apologized for a wrong note. He just kept going and landed somewhere close by. That's not a bad way to spend the next twenty years with a guitar.
Before next time — well, there isn't a next time, not in this room. So instead: pick your real four songs this week, and play them for somebody, even if it's just Heather, or whoever your Heather is. 🌷