The Best Ways to Just Play More This April

April is Guitar Month, and if you need an excuse to put everything else on hold and just play more, this is it. Not practice more in the structured, scales-and-metronome sense. Just play. Pick up the guitar more often, stay on it longer, and worry a little less about whether what’s coming out is any good.

That’s harder than it sounds. Life fills up. Perfectionism creeps in. You spend twenty minutes researching gear instead of playing the gear you already have. Guitar Month is a good reminder that none of that matters as much as actually having the instrument in your hands.

Here are a few ways to make the most of it.

Set Aside the Gear Research for a Month

There’s a specific kind of guitarist procrastination that looks a lot like productivity. Reading reviews, watching comparison videos, browsing forums, debating whether a different amp or a different pedal would finally unlock the tone you’ve been chasing. It feels like you’re doing guitar stuff, but you’re not actually playing guitar.

For April, I’d suggest a moratorium on gear research. Whatever you have right now is enough to play with. The goal this month is time on the instrument, not time thinking about the instrument.

Stop Waiting Until You Sound Good

Perfectionism is probably the single biggest barrier between most guitarists and actually enjoying their practice time. You sit down, play something, it doesn’t sound the way you want, and instead of pushing through you put the guitar down and tell yourself you’ll try again when you’re more warmed up, or more focused, or more whatever.

This month, try playing through it. Give yourself full permission to sound rough, especially at the start of a session. The warm-up period is part of playing, not a prerequisite to it. The sessions where you start messy and find your way into something good are often the most satisfying ones.

Use the Tools That Make Playing More Fun

One of the reasons guitarists stop playing mid-session is that playing alone, with no context or feedback, can get a little flat. This is where having the right setup genuinely changes things, not for tone reasons, but for engagement reasons.

Positive Grid’s Spark 2 practice amp is built around keeping you playing longer and more often. The Spark app gives you access to 33 HD amp models and 43 effects, all of which you can dial in instantly using Spark AI. Instead of spending the first part of your session tweaking knobs, you just describe what you want — something like “bright Fender clean with a touch of reverb” or “thick modern crunch” — and Spark AI pulls up matching options for you to audition on the spot. More playing, less fiddling.

ToneCloud is worth spending some time with this month too. It’s a community library of over 150,000 tones created by players from all over the world, including presets from artists like Nuno Bettencourt, Paul Gilbert, and Jake Bowen. If you’ve never gone down that rabbit hole, Guitar Month is a good time to start. Find a tone that inspires you, plug in, and just play.

And if you want to keep things interesting during practice, the built-in Creative Groove Looper is genuinely one of the more fun things to play with on a quiet evening. Lay down a chord progression, pick a drum pattern from the hundreds available across every genre, and just improvise over it. It’s a surprisingly effective way to stay engaged and actually develop as a player at the same time.

Play Something You Actually Enjoy

This one sounds obvious but it’s easy to forget. A lot of guitarists spend their practice time on things they feel like they should be working on, technique exercises, songs they’re learning, pieces they’ve been meaning to get back to, and not enough time just playing things they genuinely love.

This month, I suggest spending at least part of every session playing whatever sounds fun to you right now. Your favorite riff, a song you’ve known for years, something you just feel like noodling on. The point is enjoyment. When playing guitar is fun, you do it more, and when you do it more, you get better. That’s the whole cycle.

Make a Simple Commitment

You don’t need an ambitious practice plan for Guitar Month. In fact, I’d actively avoid making one, because the more elaborate the plan, the easier it is to abandon when life gets in the way.

Instead, make one small commitment you know you can keep. Even ten minutes a day, every day for April, is more total guitar time than most players actually log in a typical month. Put it in your calendar. Keep the guitar somewhere you’ll see it. And when April 30th comes around, I’d be surprised if you want to stop.

Check out what gear is on sale at Positive Grid this Guitar Month 2026.