The beginning of each month is an opportunity to refresh and learn something new and exciting. Want to work on sweep picking, a new and challenging song, the ability to switch open chords quickly? Now is the time to start.

I've always taught that if you practice a litle each day, rather than saving all your practice for one day, you'll see yourself progress much more throughout a month. I remember watching this video where a guitarist practices sweep picking for 100 days, and his results are dramatic.

Something we talk about all the time is that gear won't solve problems. I love buying new guitar pedals, and oftentimes they'll spark an idea for a song or a riff, but no piece of gear will help more than putting in hours of work on your playing. You can apply this ethic to anything. If you want to learn something new on guitar, to start running, to not eat junk food, and more.

You also need to know where to start. We've talked about making a practice schedule before, and I think that can help you a great deal. Rather than sitting down and aimlessly playing, get prepared before you play, and know what you're trying to tackle. This way you'll feel better about what you're working on. You can also use Chasing Sound and other guitar sites as a good starting point about what to learn.

The other big piece of getting good over a month is setting small goals. Breaking down goals into bite size chunks is much more manageable than setting big goals that might get overwhelming. You might not think at first that you can tackle big concepts, techniques, songs - but you can. The key is to start right away, and practice a little bit each day, and you will definitely see results.

I remember as a teenager putting on Yngwie's Trilogy Suite Op: 5 and thinking it was one of the coolest songs ever. When I brought that song to my guitar teacher he didn't even flinch when I said I wanted to attempt to learn it.

We broke the song down into smaller chunks, and tried to think about why and what Yngwie was doing when he was playing the song. At the time I didn't have anything like YouTube or the myriad of great guitar courses to break down his style. At the end of the month I was halfway through learning the song up to speed. You can learn anything if you start small and slow.

If you're reading this and it's already mid-way or more through the month, don't worry. Use a month from today to accomplish your goal. You can start at any time, and the best time is today.