If You Stop Playing Guitar For A While, Will You Lose Skill?

Yes and No.

It depends on how long you stop and what your skill level is at.

Allow me to explain…

If you haven’t passed the beginner phase, stopping for a year will take a BIG chunk out of any progress you have made.

Myself for example, I can tell I don’t play as fast if I miss a day of practice and it gets rustier the longer without practice.

Now, If I didn’t play for a year…

I would probably lose the ability to play a super complicated Steve Vai track, but I could probably jump back into any blues or classic rock song with ease.

You will most likely fall to the average level of competence you have prepared for.

So If you LEARNED Barre Chords, but never MASTERED Barre Chords. You will likely have to start almost from scratch in your learning.

But, if you SURPASSED Barre Chords and got competent with something more challenging like Jazz Chords AND learned the Music Theory behind them. Falling back to Barre Chords will likely be easy for you.

Now as a professional teacher, I see students that take a month off for holidays or three months off for the Summer.

I have noticed a pattern over 25 years of teaching that for every month a student doesn’t play, it’s 2–3 months to get back to where you were.

But that’s not including the time lost, you lost while trying to train those missing months back to your baseline.

So 1 month of missed lessons is more like 2–3 months back to baseline and another 2–3 months of LOST PROGRESSION.

Now you’re 4–6 months behind. Is that worth it?

Keep Playing,

AJ 💪🏽🎸