When it comes to guitar playing, there are a lot of different things you might want to work on during the course of a week. Depending on your current musical abilities and your taste in music, you may want to work like crazy on scales and arpeggios in order to become a screamin’ lead guitarist – or you may be more focused on rhythm work and simply learning lots of great chord inversions and progressions. And either of those skills can then be broken down into infinitely smaller bits and pieces, offering an endless checklist of things to practice. Of course I think you should work regularly on various elements from both those categories, if you want to be a well-rounded guitarist.

While I vary my practice regimen from day to day, week to week, and month to month, there are always some basics at which I keep chipping away. I always find some time each week to play basic fretboard exercises to keep my fingers limber. And since I’ve already got my five pentatonic and seven diatonic scale patterns pretty well automatic (remember, I started practicing those 30+ years ago) I usually devote some amount of time to drilling some kind of exotic scale or arpeggio into my sub-conscious, with the goal that I’ll throw some really cool and unusual riffs out during my next improvised solo.

I do like to fool around with genres a bit too – meaning musical genres I am not as fluent in (yet) as I hope to be some day, such as jazz and hot country pickin’. And then there are always a couple of bits and pieces of songs my band plays that I know I could always use another 10 or 20 runs through.

Whenever I don’t have anything else specific to work on, I’ll just continue to work toward making totally automatic the really tough riffs in a few particular songs played by my group. Since I’m in a Southern Rock tribute band these days, those riffs include the intro of “I Know A Little” by Lynyrd Skynyrd, the intro to “South’s Gonna Do It Again,” by Charlie Daniels, and all the solos in “Southbound,” by the Allman Brothers. I just play those riffs over and over and over again, and – at least most nights – I think it shows. (And then there are those nights when I just blow it too, which only makes me run through them a whole bunch more times the next week!)

These particular solos are those which I play pretty much note for note from the most famous versions by the original artists. Of course I had to learn them in the first place, which required quite a bit of work (and I most definitely had to slow all those riffs down to learn them and first get a handle on them.)

Here’s some more thoughts on practice routines, taken from an excerpt from my 101 Guitar Tips book:

Tip 33) Practice For Perfection

Steve Vai told me that he practices his songs and solos until he can play them 21 times in a row, at tempo, without one single mistake. One blunder – even the slightest error in bending or vibrato – and Steve starts the whole cycle of 21 over again. Now I’m not saying you should torture yourself trying to live up to Steve Vai’s demanding practice regimen, but there are definitely a couple of lessons to be learned here.

First, you can’t expect to play anything perfectly if you haven’t practiced it perfectly, which Steve obviously does. If you leave the mistakes in while you’re practicing, they’ll always be ready to jump up and ruin a performance. Use a metronome, drum machine, or other rhythm device to keep time and to mark your progress (See tip #64).

Start out slow – painfully slow if necessary – and increase the tempo only after you’ve thoroughly mastered the riff or chord change, meaning that you can play it repeatedly without a screw up, not just one or two lucky times through. If you start to feel a little burned out playing something over and over, alternate the exercise with something less frustrating, putting your nose back to the grindstone as soon as you feel relaxed and up to the challenge again. And use a little of that competitive spirit that resides in all of us to live up to that challenge.

And second, if you’re fortunate enough to be as successful as Steve Vai, you’ll be playing your songs live in concert hundreds if not thousands of times throughout your career, so running through them a few dozen times in advance is really no big deal. In fact, consider the fact that you may never have the success you’re looking for if you don’t perfect your material first.