Practise routine help!

General Music Discussion
#1

I am trying to get back into guitar and am stuck on making a practise routine. I can fit in 2 hours a day and my goals are play fast with clean picking while changing strings, good legato and rhythm (funk). I wish to further progress to do 3nps scales purely alternative picked, and then practise specific techniques such as sweeping, tapping and hybrid picking once I have the alt picking speed down to around 180bpm 16th notes.

What is the difference in speed building exercises (like bursts) and alt picking exercises and if there isn’t much of a difference should I do both in one as it will save time and I would be able to practise licks

How long should each exercise be what else should I add other than what I have mentioned above?

so far the warm up is 10 minutes, alt picking is 25, speed building is 25, legato is 25, rhythm is 15 and I don’t know what to add for the rest of the time.

Any advice is helpful!

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#2

I’d have the following advice, for what it’s worth:

  • Get a great teacher, share your requirements, and get started!
  • Use a metronome.
#3

Is there anything else other than a teacher? I’m not able to get one.

but thank you for the advice :slight_smile:

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#4

Just my opinion - remember that I am nobody, so in the end you will do you… :grinning:

I’m not sure micromanaging one’s self works all that well. Perhaps it’s best if you have a “big goal” and a series of “smaller goals” that support said “big goal”. For instance, questions like “What is one thing I can do that gets me closer to all of these goals that solves an immediate interest?” And I am thinking that the “going to the gym workout routine” is not necessarily conducive to steady improvement at music. Sometimes small details require time to sort out, and sometimes one might go over a whole bunch of things in a practice - give yourself permission to do both, just a commitment to show up every day is adequate.

I personally abhor ambiguity, so smaller daily objectives that I can show measurable success at are really what’s important to my feelings of success at the instrument. I also don’t like things that require a lot of maintenance, so a feeling of bulletproof is what I am looking for in what I practice if that makes sense…

Also what happens if you simply cannot learn how to do the escape motions to be able to play that scale in the manner that you suggest? 3nps alternate picked, 16ths at 180? A little bit rigid, and unrealistic I think. I can’t alt pick a 3 nps scale faster than 16ths at about 150 on a good day. Requires a gross amount of maintenance to be able to do that also… Time that I could be spending doing lots of other much more interesting things. HOWEVER I am pretty fast at even NPS picking, so a 4NPS scale alt picked 16ths at 180 is VERY doable, and it seems to stick. I can also Economy/sweep pick a 3nps scale at the same tempo but it has a kind of triplet feel to it. I can also Swybrid/Legato a 3nps scale at similar tempos - and again, these all seem to “stick” with not too much requirement for maintenance meaning my time is freed up considerably to work on other things that compliment and leverage these abilities.

The end result is a lot of options/strategies available…

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#5

This is wisdom.

shr, if your true goal is to play music, you want to get the mechanical aspect of the equation sorted pretty quickly. If you have to think about physical motions while playing the guitar, you will not play well. So, what can you currently do right now? What is easy?

For a longer term goal, you can dabble with mixed escape strict alternate picking, just keep in mind that the best players who do that all use generally the same form (some manner of wrist motion with a fairly flat pick trajectory). Is that a motion you can do at all right now?

Something musical. Improv over backing tracks, writing riffs, learning the fretboard…

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