10 Guitar Things You Can Practice Without a Guitar

You don’t need an instrument around to memorize key signatures. Use flashcards! Make a stack of flashcards that covers every key/scale, and make a stack of cards for every key signature (a number of #’s or b’s). Keep both stacks separate. Shuffle one of the stacks of cards; then begin the drill.

The card you just pulled says 3#’s; answer, that is A. Take the next card, and so on. Figure out the answer if you are not sure. If you don’t know how to figure this out, have your teacher cover this with you, or read up on keys signatures.

Do this till you run out of cards, then take the other stack, and do the same drill. When the card you just pulled says “4b’s”, figure it out and when you are sure, blurt out the answer: “Ab”. You will be amazed how quickly you will have all key signatures memorized. If you master this, start doing the same drills again but for minor scales.

Take any sheet music of any piece of music you haven’t seen before and practice sight-reading the notes or rhythmic placement of the notes. You could tap your foot or conduct the beat with your arm, and read or sing the names of the notes, or sing the rhythms.

Practicing rhythms, you could say “ta” (1/4th notes), “tata” 1/8th notes), “tatata” (triplets), “tatatata” (4/16ths), etc. This is a great practice to get better at reading notes and rhythms on the spot.

Given that music is a language, one of the necessary tasks to learn a language is listening to it. Listen analytically! What is the key? Is it a major or minor key? How many song sections? How long are they? What is the style? How does the song feel, the vibe? Why does it have that sound and vibe? Any guitar solos?

Listen to music you would not normally listen to. It will greatly expand your range of influences, your ear, your taste, and your musicianship.

Guess what? You actually don’t need your guitar to practice your fretboard and to memorize where all the notes are located. You could practice this while being stuck in your car in traffic, or while waiting in line in the bank or the supermarket.

Here’s how: pick any random note, for example, F#, then from the bass string to the treble string, try to figure out all the fret locations for the F# notes by heart, staying within 12 frets. (2, 9, 4, 11, 7, 2). It is a very fun challenge, and it is motivating to see how much better you get at finding the note locations when you do this exercise regularly. Do this for all 12 notes.

Start out simple first: all the C notes, all the E notes, all the A notes, etc. (Don’t start with sharps and flats right away). The only 2 requirements: know the open string names, and know that the notes EF and BC are on 2 adjacent frets, while all the other note combinations (CD, DE, FG, GA, and AB) are 2 frets apart (you skip a fret).

You will be amazed how well you’ll still improve doing those non-guitar drills that you can do anywhere, even if you cannot practice as much guitar as you would like to.

Walking is healthy: it’s very good for you. Now: while you’re taking care of your body, you could train your mind as well in the meantime. And what better way to train your mind, than with rhythm exercises? Here’s how this works: use your footsteps, as beats in a metronome. Then count rhythms, on top of your steady walking pace.

A quarter note, 1 note filling an entire beat, is the number “1”, 2 eighth notes, are counted as 1-2, a triplet is 1-2-3, sixteenth’s you count as 1234.

So every footstep you set along your way, you basically on the spot improvise rhythms, counting, for example, 1, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1, 1-2, etc, any combination of 1, 12, 123, and 1234.

The main challenge here: keeping the numbers in your triplet count (123) even, and feeling the difference between even-numbered groupings (12, 1234) and odd-numbered groupings (123). Once you get the feel for this: add triplets over 2 beats. (You then count 1-2-3 over two footsteps, called “quarter note triplets”). Then quintuplets (groupings of 5 notes, 12345), which you could count over 1 beat, or over 2 beats, etc.

This is one of THE most efficient and effective ways to get the feel for combinations of even and odd-numbered groupings of notes. More importantly, this exercise is so effective because it touches at the core of what rhythm is all about: it’s physical… it’s about motion. “Rhythm” is something you feel. You do this exercise whenever you’re walking, and I can assure you that you will be amazed at your accelerated rhythmic improvement.

This will do wonders to your understanding of rhythm and your guitar rhythm playing.

Name any random chord, for example, Bbm. Then name the fret numbers where you have the 2 bar chord versions of that chord. The answer would be: “Am shape bar chord on the 2nd fret, Em shape bar chord on the 6th fret.” This is like practicing guitar without your guitar, and the great thing is: you can literally practice this anywhere, everywhere, whenever.

No guitar is needed to train your ear. You can just pop in an ear training CD or use online ear training resources to strengthen your aural interval and chord recognition. If you’re out and about: get one of the many ear-training apps for your phone so you can practice anywhere. This is one of THE most important things to work on as a musician.

The better your ear, the easier it is to play with other musicians. Having a well-trained ear also makes it easier to learn new scales, new songs, guitar solos, and so on. Your ear basically guides your fingers to the right locations when you can tell by ear what the notes are in a melody or in a chord. You should practice this every day, without any exception. This drill should be your priority.

Learning a new scale doesn’t always have to include a guitar. Pick a new scale you wanted to learn. Memorize its structure and intervals. Memorize its scale formula. Memorize what the notes are. Mentally picture and visualize the scale on the fretboard whenever you have a quick minute to spare.

Try to see the fingerings and notes for that scale in every position visually on the fretboard in your imagination. When after a long day of work, school or errands, you finally get home and you finally have time to pick up your guitar, you will be amazed and surprised to find out how quickly you will master the scale.

When you are out and about with no guitar around, you can use downtime for memorization of music theory. Some of the things you can practice (besides the key signatures mentioned above):

• Recite chords to songs you’re trying to memorize.
• Memorize the notes in all major, minor, diminished, and augmented triads.
• Memorize I IV V in all 12 keys
• Memorize the half-step locations in all 12 major scales. (for example in the key of C, that would be E-F & B-C, in the key of A that would be C#-D & G#-A, etc.)
• Memorize the 12-bar blues progression.
• Memorize the chords in “Rhythm Changes”
• Memorize all modal interchange chords.
• Etc.

Acquiring and possessing great technical facility on the instrument, is more mental than it is physical. Victor Wooten in his book “The Music Lesson” touches upon this. Neuroscientists discovered that imagining yourself doing a certain activity, still fires off the neurons in the brain that would fire if you were actually engaging in that activity.

In other words: if you just imagine your fingers flying over the fretboard super quickly like you’re playing a Randy Rhoads or Yngwie Malmsteen solo, then the neurons in your brain that would fire off if you were physically playing that solo, still fire off even if you are not playing it.

That is why, once you acquired great technique, you typically don’t lose your technical abilities as quickly as most people generally think you would. Even if you never have time to practice as much as you would like to, your technique will not deteriorate if you occasionally visualize and imagine yourself playing technically advanced guitar parts. Dexterity, control, and coordination are all controlled from the brain in the first place, not from the muscles.