What would you do

Just a quick question for all the more gifted than me. What would you practice -- aside from the scales and chords etc. would you say practice a riff piece until you were good at it or would you maybe practice 5 or 6 different pieces for say
10 minutes each? I'm not sure if one practice technique is better than the other. Thanks for the input guys :o

My advice here would be to practice what you'd like to be good at.
When i practice i usually practice:
-Sweep picking
-Alternate picking
-Tapping
-Scales
-Chords
-Jam

and alot of other stuff like that

hope that helped just a bit :)

See, practicing scales and chords are good, but its honestly the most boring part of learning to play the guitar. I strongly agree with what ashy said, but a more interesting way of honning ure skills would be to learn songs or interesting riffs using a certain scale or a combination of chords. Once u can figure out how that fits try experimenting with scales all over the fret board. A good example of this would be learning solo's. it doesn't matter in the begining how fast or how well u can play them but u'll definitly see a connection between each note and the next. And then just learn to play it right, speed will come, things will sound much better. And learn songs that have the technique ure planning on becomign good with, like songs with sweeps or tapping, learn that one phrase and practice till ure arm falls off.

keep at it.

I personally learn Dream Theater songs. There is so much technique and theory involved with their song structures it's unreal.
By learning their songs, I've learned,
Sweep Picking
Phrasing
Counting odd time signatures
Combining different styles of music
how to play cleanly
etc......

Learning all the above-mentioned techniques is definately a good idea provided that you realize they are not an end in-and-of themselves. You started playing guitar to play songs right? Not to play a scale at 200bpm. It's very easy to get lost in your practice routine for years only to realize you have no real musical repetoire (you don't know any songs to play).

Think of learning scales like learning to drive a car.
When you first start you have to remember all this stuff to do but after 10 years of driving you can go 50 miles out of your way and forget you were even driving.