How Many Songs Should a Beginner Guitarist Actually Learn?

Ask this online and you'll get a number back within seconds. Five. Ten. "Three songs you can play all the way through at a party." The numbers are always confident and they never come with a source. I went looking for a study where beginners learned five songs and a matched group learned fifteen and somebody measured the difference, and I couldn't find one.

So I'm not going to give you a sourced number, because there isn't one. What I can do is show you what has been measured — including the parts that contradict each other — and then tell you what I'd do, clearly labeled as opinion.

Two disclosures before that, since they affect how you should read this. I build a guitar practice app, so I have an obvious interest in you organizing your playing in a particular way. And the three-way sort I suggest later is not something I derived from research — it's the data model of my own app, which I'm proposing here because I find it useful, not because a study produced it.

The most useful finding how much you practice doesn't predict how much you keep

The most relevant study here isn't about repertoire size at all. Duke, Simmons, and Cash had 17 graduate and advanced undergraduate piano majors learn a three-bar passage from a Shostakovich concerto, recorded their single practice session, and tested them the next day (Duke, Simmons & Cash, 2009, Journal of Research in Music Education).

What separated out was quality, not quantity. Practice time and repetition counts had no significant relationship with how well the passage held up the next day. Error-related measures — how much of the practice was played correctly — did. Beyond that, the authors describe what the top-ranked players did: they caught mistakes immediately, worked out the cause, and drilled that spot instead of restarting. That description is their qualitative account of the best performers rather than a separately tested predictor, so treat it as a lead.

Two caveats, because this study gets over-quoted. The participants were advanced pianists, not beginners, and it was one short passage rather than a repertoire. And with 17 people, a non-significant result is weak evidence rather than evidence of no effect — "time and reps didn't predict retention here" is not the same claim as "time and reps don't matter." What predicted retention in this one correlational study was error handling rather than volume. That's a reason to pay attention to how cleanly you practice; it isn't a demonstration that volume is irrelevant.

One song at a time, or several at once? The evidence goes both ways

This is the version of the question that has research behind it. The research disagrees with itself.

The general learning literature favors interleaved practice — rotating between different things rather than drilling one to completion. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of motor learning found that mixing things up more improved long-term retention across the studies it pooled (Scientific Reports, 2024). That result is contested: other researchers posted a preprint comment — not peer-reviewed, and written by authors whose own work the meta-analysis criticized — arguing its statistics don't support how strongly it states the conclusion. The original authors have replied, and the exchange has since continued into the peer-reviewed literature. Take it as one contribution to a live argument, not a settled result.

Then someone tested it on musicians and it went the other way. Mathias and Goldman had 20 advanced violinists (19 analyzed) learn material under three schedules — blocked, increasing contextual interference, and random — and tested them 24 hours later (Mathias & Goldman, 2025, Journal of Research in Music Education). Immediately after practice there was no meaningful difference. At the 24-hour retention test, the blocked schedule — one thing at a time — held up best.

I've cited the other side of this myself. In Why Guitar Practice Doesn't Stick I pointed at a study where switching between passages produced slightly better next-day performance — 10 clarinetists, same 24-hour interval, and an effect its own authors called modest, reaching significance for only one of the three judges who rated the recordings. So there are two music-specific studies at that interval in this article and they point opposite ways. The violin one is larger and compared three schedules rather than two, which is why I weight it slightly more, but "slightly more" is the honest strength of that preference. That's why "always practice three songs at once" is a poor rule to build a routine on — not because it's wrong, but because nobody has established it well enough to be that confident.

Spacing is in a similar state. Spacing sessions out is one of the best-demonstrated effects in general learning research, but when Wiseheart, D'Souza, and Chae tested piano novices — about half had played some instrument at some point — with gaps of 0, 1, 5, 10, and 15 minutes, they found no benefit (2017, PLOS ONE). Their retention test came five minutes after the last practice trial, so it says nothing about practicing Monday versus Monday-and-Thursday.

Practically: if you've got two or three songs going, rotating between them is fine. Just don't build a system around it, because nobody has shown it holds for guitar.

The sort I use (this is the app's data model, not a research finding)

As disclosed above: this is how my own app organizes songs, and I'm suggesting it because it's the thing that stopped me from accumulating half-learned material. There's no study behind it.

Be strict about the top row. "I can get through it without stopping" at 70% speed while reading the chords is a different thing from playing it, and if you let it count, the top row inflates into a number that means nothing.

About that "1–3": the two music-specific retention studies above disagree, and the one I weight slightly more argues for one, not three. I use three because I get bored, and because having a couple going means I always have something to pick up. That's a preference, not a result. If you'd rather follow the evidence than me, do one.

Also worth saying, because the table hides it — and this is observation, not data: for a beginner, the middle row usually isn't songs at all. It's barre chords, chord changes, and picking. Those eat the same attention a song does, so three songs plus two techniques is really five things in progress. Count them together or the constraint does nothing.

The claim I'd actually defend is that the constraint belongs on the middle row rather than the total. My guess — and it is a guess — is that a long "practicing" list usually means things are being avoided rather than worked on, because that's what it meant every time it happened to me. I have no data on whether that generalizes.

The bottom row matters more than people give it credit for. Learning an opening riff and then abandoning it isn't wasted effort — it's how you find out whether a song is worth the weeks the middle row costs. Treat it as sampling, not as failure. (If a song keeps stalling because one passage is too fast, that's usually a slow-it-down problem rather than a commitment problem.)

Why finishing matters — and where the evidence pushes back

I looked for research on whether completing pieces specifically affects whether people keep playing, and I didn't find any. There's plenty of music-specific work on motivation and dropout, but nothing I could find that isolates finishing as the variable. So what follows is reasoning, not evidence.

What we do have is data on how many people stop. Ruth and Müllensiefen surveyed 3,303 young people aged 10–17 across secondary schools in the UK and Germany, visiting schools annually — though most participants took part only once, so this is closer to repeated snapshots than to following the same individuals over time (Ruth & Müllensiefen, 2021, PLOS ONE). Among those who had ever been musically active, roughly half had stopped all musical activity by age 17, with the sharpest decline between 15 and 17. Guitar showed a somewhat higher attrition rate than piano.

Here's the part that cuts against me: the authors offer one possible explanation for guitar's higher dropout — that guitar is an easier instrument to reach a basic playing level on, so guitarists are more likely to feel they've already reached their goals at an earlier stage. If that's right, arriving somewhere is itself a reason people stop, which is close to the opposite of "finish songs and you'll keep playing."

I don't have a way to resolve that, and the sort above doesn't answer it. Maybe keeping a "want to play" list running is what stops you from feeling finished. Or maybe the researchers are right and finishing things genuinely accelerates quitting. Nobody has tested it.

The one part you can check yourself: a finished song is the thing most likely to survive a gap. Stop for three weeks and half-learned material is mostly gone, because there's nothing to hold onto, while finished songs come back in an evening. That's my experience rather than a study — and it's the one claim here you can verify in three weeks without anyone's help.

That study also covered adolescents in school settings, not adults teaching themselves from YouTube, so don't read the 50% as your odds. Read it as: stopping is the normal outcome, not the exception.

What to actually do this week

1. List everything you're currently touching. Not aspirationally — actually touching, this week.
2. Sort each one into can play / practicing / want to play. Be strict about the first one. If you can't get through it without stopping, it's still practicing.
3. Pick one to be the main song this week. Not the most impressive — the closest to done. If you keep another one or two going alongside it, that's preference rather than evidence; move the rest down to "want to play" until the main one is finished.
4. Check the bottom row isn't empty. If it is, go find something you can't play yet.

Do that once a month and the "how many songs should I know" question dissolves. The answer becomes whatever the top row happens to be — as arbitrary as any target you'd have set, but made of songs you can actually play.

One revision worth flagging: in Why Guitar Practice Doesn't Stick I told beginners to work on just one song, not five. I'd still say one is the safer default — safer precisely because the two studies disagree, and one is the option that doesn't depend on which of them turns out to be right. The 1–3 above is me admitting what I actually do.

Wrap-up

There's no evidence-based number for how many songs to learn — the studies that exist don't measure counting at all. What's measurable is that time and repetitions didn't predict retention in the one study I found that looked at it directly, and that the popular advice about splitting practice across pieces hasn't reliably replicated when tested on musicians. Keep the practicing row short, finish things, keep something in the queue behind them — and treat all three of those as my opinion, because that's what they are.

Try Fret Days

Fret Days is the app the sort above comes from — three states per song, and the time you spend with the tools lands in your log by itself, so you can see which songs are actually getting worked on rather than guessing. The free plan covers 20 songs across all three states.

See how Fret Days works →

Written by the developer of Fret Days, a guitar practice-tracking app. Every study linked above is linked at its original source, and where that source is a preprint rather than a peer-reviewed paper, it's labeled as one. Where a finding comes from a different instrument, a different skill level, a shorter retention interval than the claim would need, or a non-music domain, that's stated in the text. Where the authors of a study read their own data differently than I do, that's stated too. Where I couldn't find research at all — including for the organizing structure this article recommends — I've said so.

Published: 2026-08-04