Hello everyone, as a student I am finding it difficult to practice for more than 30 minutes to at most an hour every other day sometimes every day. When I do get the practice time in however, I don’t know how to structure it. I enjoy players like Mateus Asato and Beau Diakowicz so I’ve been throwing myself into book and videos on jazz theory and jazz guitar. I’m hoping to set a routine of posting videos here for C&C on the weekends too. Any advice or examples of personal practice routines from teachers or anyone at all are welcome!
Edit: I’ve also been getting interested in gypsy jazz!
This depends on what it is you’re trying to learn. Mechanical things? What kind of mechanical things? Fretboard mapping? Songwriting? There really isn’t a single thing called “practice”, and the techniques you’d use to work on them are very different.
However one thing I would say is that you don’t need huge amounts of time. Learning in bite-size chunks of time can be very natural, and there’s good evidence to suggest that marathon length practice isn’t as effective. It’s also a good way to avoid injury.
Thanks for the response Troy,
I’m trying to work on my picking accuracy, reading, and understanding how to use triads and scales to solo over chord changes. Through this forum I’m wanting to improve picking accuracy. Like I said I will post videos when I can. But, for right now whenever I try to play a fast run it feels very sloppy and almost like I am forcing my hand to pick these notes instead of it understanding what needs to happen. I use mostly DWPS and econ/sweeping, but I am also open to working on all other techniques. Should I start by just properly sitting down with a metronome and going glacially slow and building tempo for as much accuracy as I can? And should I go back to strict alternate picking until I feel like I completely understand it?
1 Like
No - definitely don’t do this. You don’t learn most physical activities that way. When learning to walk, you learn at natural speeds and fall down a lot. Certain activities, like riding a bike, almost can’t even be done at all super slow. Or it takes an offroad bouldering expert to do that while still maintaining balance.
I think we can do a better job of outlining where beginners should start, but there are certain topics, like why string changing is problematic, and what techniques elite players use to solve it, which we’ve covered extensively. Those concepts should be clear to you before moving further.
Have you watched any of our stuff on picking technique, and which things?
I’ve watched almost every one of the YouTube videos. There’s just so much information that I’m not sure where to begin implementing.
I firmly believe that a big portion of the theoretical and fretboard visualization process can take place away from the guitar itself. There are a couple of great websites that have fretboard trainers where you can practice naming notes, chord qualites and intervals. Great practice for when you’re sitting on the toilet/bus or waiting in the doctors office. I recommend www.musictheory.net for this. They have a great app for your phone too!
I also do lots of mental visualization. I spent a month where I would just practice visualizing major and minor triads in their inversions up and down the neck, saying the note names and fret numbers out loud, moving through the circle of 5ths. I’d do this in the car on my way to work or wherever. I also practiced scale shapes like this.
You’d be pretty amazed at how well you can teach yourself something just by imagining it in your head a few times in a row. Obviously you need some “face time” with the instrument to put everything into practice but the studies that have been done on mental rehearsal are pretty staggering, really.
2 Likes
Now that we’ve got the new site up, one of our focuses will be on adding enough introductory material so that players like you who come here looking for advice can do their own initial “primary care” checkup for mechanical basics. This includes an overview of different kinds of pick grip, and different methods of moving the pick, so you can either choose one, or verify that the one you’ve already chosen is working. These are the things that need to be working before you can really think about doing more musically-oriented practice.
But for now, there’s no reason to assume you’re doing anything wrong, and I don’t recommend changing anything you’re doing. When you’re ready, post a clip in “Technique Critique” of something you’re currently playing, especially if it’s something you feel may not currently be working. You can poke around in that category on the forum to get a sense of what some other players are doing, and the kind of feedback we’ve been able to provide. The good news is that almost everyone does more things right than wrong, and it’s often just about knowing what those are and doing more of them.
3 Likes