Have you ever struggled with what you should practice?
How you should practice and how long you should practice for?
Well in this article we are Gunna take the difficult topic of discussing how does one practice?
and break the conversation down into subsections:
Now and then its good to have a discussion on some of these topics and I invite you after watching this video to post your issues and what your routine is like for others to see.
I think a good place to start is asking the question …
How Long Have You Been Playing For?
Its good to ask ourselves some key questions when it comes to making a plan of action to practice.
The first one is how long have you been playing?
This is relevant because if you haven’t been playing for too long then your practice doesn’t have to be too long either.
Similarly if you have been playing for longer you might need to practice a bit longer but more focused on certain areas that are more intensive than say a beginner player.
Lets run through a few examples.
Lets say you are a beginner and you know how to strum a few chords and you are taking lessons with someone.
Id recommend you’d only need to practice 20 minutes a day towards what you are working on.
whereas if you have been playing for longer like 4 years and you are learning to solo whilst focusing on interesting techniques such as alternate picking, legato and more intensive muscle memory style activities.
you might need to be spending an hour at the bare minimum and up to a few hours per day to maintain and develop your coordination.
Now we understand how long we should be spending practicing we should move onto the topic of
How To Set Your Practice Goals
What are we talking about when we mean the term practice goals or goals in general?
well it may or may not occur to you that when we practice we should be having an aim in mind for example:
If I want to be able to play the F chord and im finding it difficult now what should I be doing to make that easier?
that becomes the goal for you and the next step.
Then you make a routine out of that goal to see progress until its easy to do and then you ask another question “what is it that id like to do but I feel I cant currently?”
Then you plan towards that next goal and reverse engineer that target and incorporate that into your practice routine.
The same is true if you have been playing longer and have more experience.
The principle is still the same.
Ask yourself how you get from where you are to where you want to be and plot a course on the high seas of practice and try to keep afloat.
ok enough of the sailing metaphors and onto the next topic.
What Is A Realistic Practice Routine?
Now what do we mean when we say realistic? We mean to set achievable goals that can be done within a reasonable time frame.
If we go back to that beginner example and say they want to sweep pick at 160 bpms. But they cant play that F chord.
They are going to have a bad time.
I remember coming across someone who really really loved dream theatre but had only been playing for 6 months and they would spend all their hours trying and trying to get one of the solos down.
To me and from my teaching experience its commendable that the person in this example wants to do that but also it can be a recipe for disaster as it welcomes burn out.
What we want to do with realistic practice routines is to set goals that are actually achievable.
Ask yourself that question before “where am I now, and where do I want to be” then make smaller milestones that help along that progress chart towards your main goal of being a better guitarist.
It could be singling out a new technique, sounding like someone else, learning a song, learning a chord progression, making your timing better.
Whatever it maybe just start, you will make mistakes that is just how things are but don’t let that deter you and refine your craft by always setting achievable goals.
Work Smart Not Hard
A lot of practice routines and methods of gaining progress on the guitar involve sometimes gruelling technical exercises that in reality no one ever uses to make music.
If you have heard of frank gambales chop builder, or Petrucci’s rock school or insert exercise routine from really good guitarist.
Not many of these guitarists will practice in this fashion as they are too busy maintaining their current level of skill to play their shows.
usually trying these extreme workouts and usual methods of gruelling techniques will lead to burnout and we want to avoid that at all costs.
Which is why we should work smarter not harder.
If we can get the results, we want in a more efficient way that is safe and not as time consuming, then that is the correct way to go.
Doing spider exercises as I used to for 8 hours a day doesn’t develop your musicality and in fact can hinder your playing.
You could be practicing the same technique poorly and have that reinforced by how many hours you did the same thing.
So whilst you practice it is also good to have guidance from a more experienced player.
At the same time it isn’t useful to play the same things over and over.
Its good to add variety and efficiency to what you do and make it consistent.
1 hour a day is much better than 5 hours one day. this is due to how our muscles function.
If we you to binge practice in one day you will be spending a lot of that time just warming up to the previous time you binged rather than the correct method of practicing consistently each day for a similar amount of time.
Your muscles will develop and your technique and practice will have better results.
This is what we mean when we say practice smarter not harder.
Record Your Progress
For some of us recording our progress in a journal or diary can really help as it can be a written record of how much you have done in a day.
This is also used as a mental reinforcement that you have done the practice you need to and you can see the level of completion on your tasks. due to this sense of achievement towards the goals you have set from the discussion we had earlier,
You will start to feel confident in your own playing looking back at the several days and weeks on that topic knowing you are getting closer and closer to these goals.
This is what it can look like
What I do is mark down what I have done per day, how long I spent on it and I do that after I have done the exercise not before.
If you write out before what you expect yourself to do and you don’t meet your own expectations then that can be demoralising and its not productive.
The best way is to write down the progress you have made so when you look back upon this you can feel confident that knowing you have practiced what you need to practice towards your own goals. You then repeat this process when you change goal to a new goal.
I hope you enjoyed these tips to set you up for success in your practice routines, you should see this advice as a guideline to make your own routine.
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