How much time do you spend practicing each day?

Playing Technique
#1

If you had to average it out, about how much time do you spend practicing each day?

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#2

I’ve been upping the amount I practiced, and noticed some discomfort, so I found this great hand stretching routine and it’s helped a lot. No more pain, but I can tell my muscles are getting stronger and more limber:

#3

I average 2-3 hours on days I work, and anywhere from 5-10 hours on days off. I practice legato, tremolo, chunking scale fragments and licks, a bunch of galloping and down picked metal rhythms, and sweep and cross picked arpeggios.

I’ve lately been really focusing on getting my synchronization and endurance better with stringing my descending and ascending runs together. I’m able to hit them as separate 16th note chunks between 160-170 bpm, but they usually fall apart when I combine then.

I also noticed it’s easier for me to begin on a descending pattern and end on an ascending versus the other way around.

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#4

I’m probly doing 2-3 hours a day now. When I was younger and less responsibilities It would not be uncommon to play for 6 to 8 hours.

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#5

I’ve been playing for 26 years. When I first started at 16 I would play at least 4 hours per day, every day.

Nowadays, with work, children and wife, I’m lucky if I get in 1hr per day on workdays and 3 hours on my days off. But I don’t practice in the guitar-playing sense (scales, arpeggios etc). I focus completely on writing songs. Being able to play these songs and coming up with parts is my practice.

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#6

For what it’s worth, I think the most perishable thing is coordination between the two hands, which probably takes the longest to rebuild if you go a long time without playing. I think “linear” right-hand speed and consistency by itself is kind of like riding a bike: once you’ve “turned the corner” in your development, it’s something that’s pretty much always there, give or take. I think where “long hours” come in for the picking hand is the process of discovery through trial and error to find what works. I think once you get that knack, maintenance on the picking hand by itself should be pretty low. More complex string-skipping and one-note-per string stuff is trickier because the picking patterns for particular licks of those types are more novel. In general I think the higher the average number of notes per string in a song/lick/solo, the less maintenance it requires.

Edit: And I think the most difficult part (which is the reason so many people play covers), is developing the musicality and improvisation ability of pros like Martin Miller, Guthrie Govan, Mike Stern: the ability to play technically demanding stuff but to maintain awareness of the harmonic context and how what you’re playing fits into it, and to make informed decisions about what you’re going to play next.

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#7

I don’t practice enough at all. Maybe noodle around for 20 minutes at a time a few times a week. Some days I don’t play at all :frowning:

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