Arpeggios: Arpeggios are the bridge between chords and scales, and they should be part of every practice routine. Playing arpeggios from bottom to top and from top.

5 Minutes Daily

Borrowing: As you listen to music from different artist, styles, genres or even other instruments, open your ears for ideas that you want to amalgamate into your own playing. This kind of openness will add depth to your playing, and help you avoid periods of creative drought in your playing.

Daily, as Exposed to Music

Chords: It goes without saying that chords are the workhorse of guitar music. Learn open chords, bar-chords, inverted chords, extended chords, sustained chords, augmented chords, diminished chords. To be like guitar George, who knows all his chords, you need to practice a lot of chords every day, and stuff a lot of them into your memory banks.

10 Minutes Daily

Darkness: That's right... total darkness. Take the time to play with all the lights out. This reinforces the direct link between your hands and your ear. Instead of seeing what your hands are doing, learn to feel what they are doing in relation to what you hear them doing. This is a super-potent exercise for refining your tactal and aural abilities.

10 Minutes 3x Weekly

Exercise: Not guitar exercise... Physical exercise. Get out and get your heart pumping. Stretch and do some push ups and pullups. Practicing guitar is no excuse for letting your body go to the dogs. While you are exercising, use this time to listen to your favorite guitar influences. An iPod can be one of your best investments.

30 Minutes 3x Weekly

Fingerpicking: Put your pick away for a while, and get in touch with with your guitar. Also try combination of picking with your flat pick and fingers for a little different articulation than with a pick alone.

Mixed with Picking

Gambling: There is no subsitute for thorough preparation in playing, but taking an occasional gamble can sometimes pay off. Try going for broke on some of your toughest leads in front of some of the friends you want to impress the most. If you win, you win big. If you lose, all you have lost is a moment in time, but you have learned a lot from the experience. Learn to play the tough hands with a straight face, cool, calm and relaxed. Don't dwell on the weak cards in the hand you are playing, just ante up and play. Enjoy the game.

As Opportunities Arise

Harmonics: Learn to play false harmonics on the 12th fret above the fretted notes of your left hand. Also, learn all the names of the natural harmonics over the 12th, 5th, 4th and 9th frets. Try substituting these harmonics over fretted notes.

15 Minutes Weekly

Interval Training: Notes don't make music, intervals do. Our mind hangs on to the last note played in a melody, and anticipates the next, which creates our perception of motion in music. The distance between notes played melodically or harmonically should be understood by the mind and the fingers. Know all your intervals up and down. On the same strings and across strings. This will help you nail new melodies you hear the first time, without having to fumble around the fretboard to find the right notes.

5 Minutes Daily

Jamming: Now this is what it is all about. Actively pursue being able to play with other musicians. Learn from those better than you, and be patient with those that are a little behind. They are learning too! Learn to organize your jam sessions around common knowledge, such as common tunes, or common chord progressions that you all know. Careful not to let egos interfere with the music.

Every chance you get

Kinetic Energy Focus: In guitar, we use kinetic energy of our fingers and picks to make music. The more efficient our movements, the less wasted motion, and the more kinetic energy is converted to speed. Minimize the wasted motion in your right hand by picking with precision. Minimize the wasted motion in your left hand by using proper positioning of the fingers just above the frets, the proper voicings in the chords and scales to minimize left-hand travel, and using the best available fingerings to allow playing passing notes even when the left hand is changing position.

Every Time You Play

Left-Hand Only: This includes hammer-ons, pull-offs and bends and slides. Left hand only exercises will help improve your leads and licks overall. You can do this at the same time you practice scales, or other leads.

3 Minutes Daily.

Muting: Take some time to focus on deadening the strings that are not being played. If you are not paying attention to this, chances are you are making unwanted noise on your extra strings. Consciously determine whether left-hand or right-hand music works best for what is being played.

Every Time You Play

Nashville Numbering System: This system is the best way to get the sound of the harmonic scale into your ears and hands. Using numbers for chords in the harmonic scale, all musicians in the band are instantly able to relate the chords to each other without the need to read music.

5 Minutes Daily

Open Strings: Experiment with the songs you already know to see if ringing open strings can add a new dimension to the chords you are already playing. Guitar is very well suited to this kind of effect, and most bar-chord-locked players don't ever think to try it. It can set you apart from the crowd.

As Opportunity Affords

Punching Through: This vitamin pertains to adjusting your tone and choice of melodies and chord voicings to punch through the bed of sound created by your other band members, without having to increase your volume. It means to play notes that are not already being played or sung by someone else in the band. Two-note harmonies work excellently in this application, and punch through more effectively than bar chords to be sure.

As Opportunity Affords

Quiet: Guitars in the wrong hands can be an endless source of noise. Introducing timely pauses in the middle of a piece can create tension, and anticipation, and has the effect of winning back a lost audience. Try it in some of your music to see if you can add some life to your songs. Also, quite refers to keeping volume below the pain threshold when practicing, and saving your ears, your dog's ears, and your audience's ears.

As Opportunity Affords

Reading Music: Small doses of reading music in both standard notation and tablature everyday is more effective than avoiding it until you have to, then beating your head against the wall when you need it. Take some sheet music with you in your backpack or on a plane, and read a few bars while waiting for your ride.

10 Minutes Daily

Scales: Another staple of any serious practice routine. Learn scales backwards and forwards, vertically and horizontally, major, minor, pentatonic, blues, modes, exotic, etc. Learn to fit scales over chord progressions. Learn to play in time... quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes. Tuplets and triplets. Get the scales into your ears and fingers, and everything else is just gravy.

10 Minutes Daily

Timing: Use a drum machine or metronome. Get your tempo going, then try to work those quarter notes up to eighth notes, and then graduate to sixteenth notes. Try to increase your sense of synchopation, going with and against the rhythm in interesting ways.

During Practice Drills

Upstroke: When flat-picking, almost everyone has a stronger downstroke, but the upstroke can be problematic. By practicing your upstroke twice as much as your downstroke, you can equalize the imbalance in strength.

During Practice Drills

Verbalize: When learning note names, intervals, scales, chords, chord changes, etc., it really helps your memory if you say or sing what you are playing. This will cut down on the time it takes to master these basic elements.

During Practice Drills

Writing: Take a music pad with your wherever you go. This is to jot down ideas that are keepers. If you don't write it down... too often it's gone forever. That is until you hear someone else playing it on the radio. You get the idea.

Every Opportunity

X-treme playing techniques: Dive Bombing, Legato Phrasing, Middle-Eastern Effects, String Skipping, String Scraping, Whammy Melodies, The Difference Tone, The Gargle, EVH Elephant, Satch String Pull, are all great techniques to learn, but they can't substitute for being solid musically. Practice these special effects to add spice to your playing, but don't make them the main course.

As Needed for Boredom

You-niqueness: In all the playing you do, remember, remember that it's more fun and profitable to play things your own way, than to learn to mimic other successful players exactly. Let other players inspire you and let them teach you things you would not have learned on your own, but always try to put your own signature on what you play.

Every Opportunity

ZZZZZ...: Get plenty of sleep! Recent studies prove that sleep deprivation significantly increases health risks, and reduces cognitive functions, creating symptoms similar to attention deficit disorder. In guitar, you simply can't learn as much as fast if your faculties are impaired by lack of sleep. Trade in those after-gig party hours for some z's, and you'll be amazed at the difference in your playing.

8 Hours Nightly