Practice guitar smarter

I have been playing guitar for a while, only to have some fun, I like to have my guitar for a mindful play instead of a disciplined learning process, which I do for music production, or piano etc. but recently I becamed tired of not advancing very fast with the guitar, specialy with changing chords, my left hand starts to hurt, I cant really play what I hear in my mind etc. So I started searching on Internet of a way to learn guitar the smartest way possible, I stumbled with this great blog: http://www.justinguitar.com/ , this guy is great, he plays really good, and he explains great, he has a lot of material, but one of the things I found that helped me right away was a practice routine for beginners:

will suggest 15 / 20 minutes of practice to start (six days a week), if you can do more then increase the times of all the areas and / or add in some other exercises! You have to make some decisions because I can’t see you and spot the errors and things you need to work on.

Check out the Beginners Course for info on the exercises, and some will be found in The Basics.

Stage 1
To start off with you just need to get some basic chords under your fingers. I usually start with the chords E, A and D. That is it! So I start with this:

5 mins – Chord Practice (strum, pick notes one at a time, strum)
5 mins – One minute Changes (changing chords as fast as you can in one minute, five combinations)
5 mins – Some easy 3 chord songs, just to get playing something…
Stage 2
Once you have that sorted then try and get some more chords down. You may find you need to get your fingers stretching a bit too, for the G and C chords.

5 mins – Chord Practice (as before but add in your new chords)
5 mins – One minute changes (changing chords as fast as you can in one minute, five combinations)
5 mins – More song practice (using your new chords too)
5 mins – Finger stretching exercise (optional)
Stage 3
Then you should start with some basic strumming, while still working on your chord changes. DO NOT start adding in your strumming until you can make your changes fast enough to keep the strumming even!

5 mins – Chord practice (all chords you have done so far)
5 mins – One minute changes (work on the ones that you find the hardest)
5 mins – More song work
5 mins – Basic rhythm guitar patterns

Stay on Stage 3 until you can make your changes over 20 times in a minute, and can comfortably play some easy strumming patterns (not including ties). You should try and get your chords as clear as possible.
Stage 4
Now you want to start incorporating some basic rhythm patterns to your chord changes in some easy songs.

5 mins – Chord practice (all chords so far and include F Chord)
5 mins – One minute changes (still working on the ones you find hardest)
5 mins – More work on getting your rhythm patterns sounding cool 😉
5 mins – Song work (trying to us the strumming patterns in songs that you learnt earlier)

This stage is important – getting your chords and rhythm in place – don’t worry about getting it “perfect” just work on it – you have more time to get it spot on – just be able to do it!
Stage 5
Now I think you should start doing some fun stuff while you develop your basic rhythm and chord skills. Learning a scale is good to help you get you used to picking out one note at a time as well.

5 mins – One minute changes (just the hard ones) * plus some chord practice if needed*
5 mins – More work on getting your rhythm patterns sounding cool 😉
5 mins – Song work (trying to us the strumming patterns in songs that you learnt earlier)
5 mins – Learn the Minor Pentatonic Scale

etc. etc. you can learn the whole routine here

or you can learn an intermediate routine from him here

what I started to do right away was the 1 minute changing chords exercise, this guy even made an app which is called one minute changes by justin guitar.

And it has worked really good, but know, for the exercise to work really good, the chord changes must be perfect, without any mistake, because if you start studying with mistakes your brain will also learn the mistakes, so from the beginning you should learn without mistakes, a perfect sounding chord, even if you start really slow…