Free Guided Practice Videos on Youtube

HoustonGuitar’s 600+ Guided Practice video series is your personal Chord & Scale Gym.

Let’s face it. Practicing alone is a drag. It’s lonely, it’s easy to get distracted. Teachers show you how to play, but they don’t practice with you. It’s hard to concentrate on how fast you’re supposed to play, for how long. If only there was a way to feel like someone was there with you. If there was only someone who would take you by the hand and show you what to play, how fast, and for how long … Now there is.

Introduction & Description

HoustonGuitar has a large catalog of Guided Practice videos for guitar. This catalog is aimed at beginning and intermediate players. It’s especially aimed at intermediate players who want to prepare to play on stage, or play with more experienced players. Guided Practice videos work the same way as other exercise videos. The idea is to keep up with the action. Play the same thing as me, at the same tempo, and for the same length of time. It’s everything you need to thoroughly cover the basics of traditional rock, blues and country guitar – for free.

There are several advantages to using HoustonGuitar’s Guided Practice videos. They’re recorded to a steady drum track, so you quickly develop a solid sense of timing. They give you benchmarks for your progress in basic skills related to rhythm and lead guitar. They cover a range of important skills, like strumming patterns over open chord changes, and bass-down and alternating bass patterns for each chord shape. They cover major and pentatonic scales, including three common melodic formulas for both major and pentatonic scales. They cover right-hand cross-picking patterns, and chord/melody patterns. They also include the Fingerpicking For Beginners video series on Youtube.

These practice routines are not exciting. They’re not fun (unless you like playing guitar). These routines are work. They require patience (for two minutes). Getting through them is a grind. This free lesson catalog is here for people who are serious about becoming better players. If you want to be even a decent, well-rounded guitar player, then you have to be able to play everything covered in these videos. These are short, repetitive parts that drill down on the bare essentials. If you want to play in a band, or impress people at the open-mic, then you have to be able to perform at this level. If there’s anything here you can’t follow from start to finish (between 90 seconds and 2 minutes), then you do not have the endurance you will need if you want to play on stage. You need to be able to play any of these parts consistently, at the tempo shown, and for the length of time shown – without faltering or making a mistake.

As an experienced stage performer and guitar teacher, I say that if you do these exercises, then you possess basic pro-level skills. If you can’t do these exercises, then you are limited in basic pro-level skills. The time you spend with these exercises is constructive use of your practice time.

Guided Practice routines last from 90 seconds to two minutes. The length of an average song is three to four minutes, or longer. The length of a jam at an open mic rock/blues jam can go as long as ten minutes. You don’t want to be the guy or girl who folds in the middle because you don’t have the strength to keep going. The first time this happens to you, you will immediately understand what you must do next. That’s when Guided Practice routines start looking a lot better.

You see, if you want to be a jammer, there’s a mindset you need to get into: Keep Playing Until the End. That’s the name of the game when you’re jamming. Inwardly, you lose your sense of how long you’ve been playing, and you’re not thinking about how much longer until the end. Guided Practice routines put you in that jamming mindset where you just focus on playing your part until it’s time to stop. As working musicians, that’s the mindset we live in. It’s a hypnotic mindset where you lose your sense of self-awareness, except for the music and your muscle memory.

The Guided Practice series was produced over the course of several years. The sound quality on some of the early videos is not as good as more recent videos, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable to players who are serious about getting better on guitar. There’s nothing magical, or unique about HoustonGuitar’s Guided Practice videos. Once you see what they cover, and once you establish the “right” practice habits, you don’t need to go back to them.

You don’t have to use Guided Practice to get good. Once you get the idea, you don’t even need these videos. But you have to get thoroughly conditioned in basic chord and scale techniques, in both hands. You have to build up hours of focused muscle memory. You have to develop a feel for playing a range of tempos. (Slow tempos can be difficult for different reasons than fast tempos.) If you can do all of that, then you can get into a good musical mindset.

Note: Guided Practice videos are not listed individually on the HoustonGuitar Youtube channel. They won’t show up in searches or feeds. This catalog of more than 600 videos can only be accessed through playlists on the HoustonGuitar Youtube channel, or through links from this website. You can bookmark any video and return to it later, without going through the website or playlist. The HoustonGuitar Youtube channel shows only guitar backing tracks and lesson videos. This is so specialized practice videos, and the Fingerpicking For Beginners videos, don’t appear randomly in searches, or in users’ feeds.

Update Dec 11, 2024: I’m still in the process of creating lesson pages for the Guided Practice series. I’ll be rolling it out over the next few weeks.