Mental Practice

Summary: Practice and play away from the instrument.  

Mental Practice, or mental performance, is playing an imaginary guitar in your mind. It’s an extremely useful for working on technique and repertoire.

For technical work, you can imagine the notes, fingering, and the feel of the strings and your pick. If you have practiced an item intently during the day, you may be able to recreate the work you’ve done. If you don’t have much time to physically practice, this can still bring you benefit. It’s mentally tiring, because you need to recreate everything as faithfully as you can; however, it’s very good because it exercises the mental retrieval of your physical work, which is often a source of tension. If you can faithfully imagine what you’re playing, it helps organize your thoughts and approach. It can also reveal stumbling blocks: if your mind struggles to get through part of a passage, your playing probably does as well!

For repertoire, mental practice is even more useful. You can imagine the sound of the lick or passage, as clearly as you can, its larger structure, and review its placement and positions on the fretboard, and the picking or plucking motions. Thinking through this away from the fretboard is a super exercise, because you’re no longer going on muscle-memory-autopilot – which is great for playing, but can gloss over details and the bigger picture). Take a lick or passage you can play, and see if you can play through it mentally, with the right motions. It may reveal how much you’re relying on hand memory, and how much you’re sailing through on autopilot. That’s not necessarily a bad thing! But it’s good to be aware of it.

Mental playing of a passage might be a mix of detailed conscious thought, and unconscious thought. When you are planning fast fluid material, you are usually not conscious of every note, and when you review it mentally, you might find that you can’t think of what you played. That’s normal – I’m actually not sure what the best ratio of conscious thought to unconscious thought is, you’ll have to sort it out. For some tricky repertoire, conscious mental review of every measure of a piece might be necessary, in order to prevent memory stumbles while playing.

Practicing Mental Practice

Take any short passage you’re currently working on, less than 10 seconds long. It could be part of a song, an etude, or a lick.

  1. Clear your mind, and pick up your guitar.

  2. Play through the passage.

  3. Take your hands off the fretboard and strings, and see how clearly you can recreate the sound and the feel of playing this same lick. Get as much detail as you can: the weight of the guitar, the notes, the tone, the feel of the frets and strings and pick, hand and finger position, etc.

  4. Play through the passage again, noting any new details. Then again, in your mind, recreate everything as faithfully as you can.

  5. Repeat until your mind tires. Don’t overdo it, it’s mentally tiring. If your attention wanders, that’s enough for the day!

Sometimes, you notice that you’re not really hearing what you’re playing! If you can’t sing or hum the notes in your passage (transposing for your voice), then maybe you were going by your hands, and not your ears. No problem, it’s something to work on. Sometimes you really have to play something slowly, even just one single note, in order to really hear it.

The above drill might result in increased presence and alertness while you are actually playing and improvising. It will also improve your retention and retrieval (from memory) of the passage, which means less mental tension, easing your playing. The faster you can think, the better you can play.

Mental Practice during actual practice

Since everything above is about alertness and noticing, this technique is very useful during practice as well. If you’re practicing a tough lick, instead of mindlessly repeating each attempt one after the other, it is very good to slightly pause and reflect on what’s going on. This doesn’t just give you muscles a short break, it organizes your thoughts, and lets you prep for the next one.

At the end of practice, keeping a Keep a Practice Journal also helps organize your thoughts, and review how everything went.

So, I’ll be preachy:

Tip

Pay attention to what you’re doing!

… and I hope that the above tip comes across in the spirit it’s intended!