Guitar plan for 2025: How to excel as a guitarist

Happy New Year!!!

Numbers don’t mean much, but beginnings are a great excuse to restart and re-energise ourselves

Here’s a guitar plan I made for you, guitar lovers, to musically thrive in 2025:

12 progress-boosting habits to become the guitarist you want to be, mainly if you’re into composing and improvising emotional guitar music!

Consume

Our musical and creative brain needs stimulation and inspiration, like the need for food to survive. Enhance your musical palette by listening daily to a music piece you never heard before. For example, get a list of historical classical composers or even better guitar composers, like Fernando Sor, Mauro Giuliani, and Agustín Barrios. Then, immerse yourself for a few minutes in their music without doing anything else but listening. 

Connect

Music is a language of emotions, so to become better musicians we need to better connect with our and others’ feelings. Makes sense, right? To do so, have a daily experience that can make you feel something. For example, watch an emotional film and then play the guitar while you’re under the influence. You’d likely be inspired to create a new guitar song. It worked for James Hetfield and others.

Cover

Another source of inspiration is playing other people’s music, preferably in a style you have never tried before. This will give you new, original ways of playing the guitar. Learn something new daily. For example, open a website like Songsterr or a book of guitar compositions, randomly choose something, and start playing while trying to understand what went through the composer’s mind.

Calibrate 

Playing music is not just about moving your hands. We need to improve and maintain our inner ear and voice, and the best way to do this is to practice with your voice and sing. My little tip: If you have an electric toothbrush, it produces a drone (a steady pitch). You can brush your teeth and practice your intervals with it simultaneously, starting with calibrating your voice to the drone. This is the most essential interval called unison and then move on to the next intervals: 2nds, 3rds, and so on.

Create 

If you’d like to be a creative guitarist, get into the daily habit of creating new things. The first four recommendations above can definitely help, and there are many other methods that help cultivate guitar creativity and improvise and compose guitar music. For example, a fun way is to throw dice, assign specific notes, intervals or chords to each number, and let chance help you write unique music. 

Critique 

Decide on one important guitar technique or skill you want to improve, then plan to spend a few weeks on it and work towards achieving your goal step-by-step, day-by-day. Let’s say, for example, that you’d like to play faster and more accurately. Start at a slow tempo and play a simple tune so you’ll have enough time to listen to your playing and correct errors if you need to. Work with a measurable device like a metronome to track your progress and gradually increase the tempo.

Capture

Even when you play slowly, hearing everything that comes out of the guitar, like slight noises, is still tricky. That’s why recording or, even better, filming your daily sessions is very important so you can listen back to them. Worried about space on your phone? You can go live on YouTube and even do so privately if you don’t want others to listen. 

Commit

Gaining healthy habits is all about doing them daily. Play every day, even if it’s only for one minute (hopefully, one minute will turn into two, three, and more). Block a regular time in your calendar with reminders to make it happen—early morning, late at night, or any other suitable time. 

Concentrate

It’s so easy to get distracted: phone notifications, surrounding noises, people around you… So to ensure an optimal practise session, put your mobile on flight mode, put a timer on, and find a quiet space for yourself to enjoy quality time with your guitar.

Care

If you are committed to your progress and do it daily, you also want to take good care of your most important tool—your hands (because you are the real instrument!). Do stretching exercises before and after your practise session. You can follow this short video I once made with my favourite stretches – it’s only 30 seconds long.

Celebrate

There’s always something to do, and long to-do lists can be overwhelming and demotivating when you realise how much is left. Instead, celebrate your daily efforts and all that you’ve accomplished each day. Tap on your shoulder, say “Well done”, and reward yourself with something that makes you feel great (to me, that’s playing the guitar… ). 

Consult

To stay on track with your habits, you need a structured guitar plan for 2025. Random YouTube video searches lead to a random plan, and generic guitar courses give a generic plan that doesn’t consider your wishes and needs. Instead, consult an experienced and professional guitar teacher/coach who can provide you with a structured and personalised plan you can follow daily, with a clear end goal you’d like to achieve. A mentor is also someone you can consult with daily!

If you’d like my help with your guitar plan for 2025, I have a New Year’s offer for you here: https://calendly.com/udiglaser/guitar-plan

Do you have more tips for a guitar plan in 2025? Comment below!