Learning a guitar cover by ear from the full mix is slow because the guitar is buried under drums, bass, and vocals. Isolating the guitar stem and looping short sections changes that. You hear the exact notes, repeat the tricky bars dozens of times, and slow the tempo without changing the pitch. This article lays out a practice workflow that turns a hard riff into muscle memory.
Isolate the guitar stem
Separate the song so you can solo the guitar and hear every note clearly. Pulling the guitar out of the mix removes the guesswork: instead of straining to pick the part out from under the vocals and drums, you hear the fingering, the bends, and the muting directly.
Loop the bar that breaks down
Identify the single bar or two where your playing falls apart and loop only that. A two-bar loop you can play fifty times in a few minutes teaches your hands far more than playing the whole song once. Expand the loop outward only after the hard bar is clean.
Slow it down, then bring it back up
Drop the tempo until you can play the loop cleanly without mistakes, then raise it in small steps. Practicing fast and sloppy just trains mistakes. Slow and accurate, gradually sped up, is how the riff becomes reliable at full speed.
Follow the synced tab
Reading a tab that scrolls in time with the audio links what you hear to what you play. You stop hunting for the next note and start anticipating it, which is the moment a part shifts from reading to playing from memory.