I'm glad you brought this up. Myself, when I pick up a guitar for the first time during the day, I play a couple of blues scales to warm up my fingers.

Sometimes when I find myself in a rut is when I am trying to come up with something for a new song or jam.I have found a few things that give me inspiration for that though. The first one being that anytime I get a new guitar, something always comes to mind LOL, but of course that gets expensive after awhile LOL. Whether it's the sound of the guitar, the feel, I don't know. Now I can't keep buying guitars just to come up with something new if I find myself in that situation, so learning new chords, playing an old chord that I haven't played in awhile, learning a new scale or even a simple riff have always given me guidance to come up with something.

I guess learning something new, keeps my mind fresh. Or playing something old or long lost, refreshes my mind a little.

I definitely agree with "Perfect practice makes perfect." I have come up with what I think are pretty cool songs or riffs in the past and when I have practiced them over and over again, I feel after awhile that I have lost the edge from when I first nailed what I wanted.

Is there such a thing as over practicing? LOL.

Great topic! Kudos for that one!

Personally, I just start off playing. I've never worked on scales, but I guess that's because I don't care about lead. I work strictly on rhythms. Oh, sure, there's a lot of picking in there, hammers, pulls, etc., but it's chording and changes I work on.

I've never found myself in a practice rut. I realize that, after 40 years of playing, that I have to practice a minimum of one hour each day just to maintain my skills. Longer if I'm learning something new. It's nature of the beast. If I don't practice, then I don't play very well and since the object here is to play well, even maintenance practice is a goal. Having a goal is key to anything you want to do.

Seems you set your goal for a specific song and now you need a new one. If you set a goal that constantly renews itself, (like keeping the skills you've already learned and learning a new skill each week,) you'll meet your goal every week and have a new one for the next week without even planning it.

Guess it all comes down to mindset.

I like to learn a handful of licks and just practice them everytime I pick up the guitar for whatever reason. So, if I want to play a few songs, I'll warm up with the licks and then play. If I want just to strum randomly, I'll play the licks first. Then, after a while, you know those licks down pat and your fingers have built up both memory and muscle. Do that a few times and you're half-way to really being able to move up and down the frets.

I only practice scales about 1 out of 5 times I pracitce. But when I do, its for an hour or more. I know thats stupid, been trying to break myself of that. Im a lead player, so I need to fix it. I play with two cover bands currently, and I have a gig on July 4th with one of them, in which I sing about half the songs.

Each night(about 5 times a week) I generally run through the whole set (with mp3 and without) then pick 2 or 3 songs to work on that night, usually spending 20 minutes on each song.

I would suggest writing down a set list for practice. Nothing in stone, but just a one pager of things to do. Maybe more strucutred would help. My need to practice singing and playing the cover songs keeps me quite busy, although not very innovative.

C

I'm not much of a lead player either and consider myself more of a rhythm player, but I find that playing simple blues scales gets my fingers limber and warmed up. Rhythm junky here LOL. The replies are great as everyone takes a different approach and I definitely find this interesting.

I don't practice anything in particular, depends on my mood i guess. but on the norm i practice 1 to 2 hours aday sometimes more. Be it rhythm or lead.

10min. I start with scales. Minor, Major, Pentatonic
5min. Then finger sped drills
5min. Next I work on picking drills(sweeping,palm mute,speed)
10min. Go through some chord progressions
20-30min. Now I'm warmed up and start what my lesson for the week is
30min.-1hour Last I work on writing a song or learning a cover

I usually break it down into something like this:

1) Spend some time playing those scale runs I'm comfortable with, just to get my fingers moving. Amin, E Blues, etc etc.

2) Play through a few sections of some outrageous songs I'm comfortable with. Pipeline. Scarified. you know, the really extremely fast / all over the place type stuff. Again, it's to get the fingers moving but this time in a bit more musical way than just scales.

3) Go online and look up something new. I just recently discovered Paul Gilbert covering "Fly Me to the Moon" and it's awesome! Just find something that makes you want to play, then find some music for it (or, if you want to exercise your ear, transcribe it yourself) and start playing it.

I usually try to pick stuff from varying styles. Right now, it's "Fly Me to the Moon", and a transcription I'm working on of Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana".