Develop a Better Guitar Practice Routine

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to this course. My name is Will. I have a lot of experience as a performing musician, songwriter, guitarist. I played bass in bands, keyboard, synthesizer, done a lot of singing of a great deal of musical experience. And this course is designed to help you understand what I've learned about practicing, right? So there are two big factors that I have incorporated in my own practice routine and that I relate to my private students. One is visualization and the other is a good proper, a practice routine that sort of designed to optimize my time. So I'm going to cover both of those in this course. This course is really designed for folks who are looking to practice guitar regularly. But they want to know how to get more out of their practice time. So it's not necessarily for beginners or for intermediate players. Anybody who feels like they're struggling with an effective practice routine is going to benefit from this course. So thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to seeing you in the lessons. 2. What is Visualization?: All right, so what is visualization in the context that we're talking about here as far as my practicing to talk. Let's imagine a few scenarios. Let's imagine a scenario in which you are trying to practice a scale right? Now. One of the things that most guitarist face when they start learning something new on the fret board is they stumble. They don't know exactly which string or which finger there playing, depending on how advanced you've become. You've probably experienced this at some point, at least. Now if you actually close your eyes and you imagine what finger is gonna play, which string on which Fred? At what time am I going to be doing and downstroke or an upstroke if I'm playing with a pic, actually doesn't do it, but visualize it. Now this can strain most of my students, patients quite a bit. But I guarantee it pays big dividends because what it really comes down to is you're going to spend some energy thinking carefully about what you're doing that added attention is going to optimize your practice time over the long haul. So I'm going to leave it there for now. But in the next lesson I want to talk a bit more deeply about why and how this works. Because I think it's important to understand how and why it works and what my experience has been, what my students experienced at the bid. And it'll help fortify you bet when you have to go through this process at the very beginning, you'll find that may be a very challenging. And I want you to, I want you to have good reason to believe in it. So let's talk about that in the next lesson. 3. Why Does Visualization Work?: So let's talk for a minute about why does this work? Ok, so imagine this. When you sit down, you practicing your scale, you're thinking maybe so diligently about what you're fretting hand is doing that you can't pay attention to your strumming hand, you picking him, or vice versa, maybe you're trying to learn some finger picking pattern and you're not paying attention at all to fretting hand. Okay, so what the visualization does in a significant way is it brings, it makes it so that if you're honest with yourself, you're going to have to bring your attention fully to both of these steps. What exactly is going on every step of the way? There's something very satisfying about just getting your hands on the instrument. And I think that what makes it satisfying is that we can be kinda lazy about what we're paying attention to. It's gratifying. We just kind of pick up the guitar and try our best. But if you actually avoid playing the guitar for a second, just for a few minutes before you actually attempt it. And you close your eyes and you envision you visualize exactly am I going to, what exactly am I going to be doing with which fingers on which hands at what time? What's the coordinates you're going to be? Is it a downstroke? Upstroke? Is it my middle finger? On what fret on what string? Visualizing that brings an enormous amount of new attention to exactly what you're doing now I'm not saying that it's going to be a silver bullet and anything you visualize your gonna master over night. What I am saying is that it's always going to help you. It's always going to improve and optimize the time that you spend. Now if you look at just the sheer amount of time, I would say that in a 30-minute practice schedule, if you spend five minutes of that visualizing what you're doing, you'll make gains in, I don't know, a quarter or a third of the time that somebody would make if they don't do any visualizations. Alright, and that's been an experience that I've observed with myself and my private students as well. So let's talk a little bit more in the next lesson about, well, what can you visualize? What kinds of things does this apply to? 4. When to Use Visualization: Welcome back. Now want to talk about what can we use visualization for, right? So of course, one of the best ways to do this is to visualize scales when you're learning new scale patterns and modes, Dorian mix, Libya and things like that. Or if you are trying to imagine new chords, you trying to use visualization to learn new chord shapes that your hand doesn't know. Strange chords that are unfamiliar to you that can be really, really helpful there as well. If you are trying to learn alternate picking, you're trying to master that technique. That thinking about when you skip strings, imagine playing a scale, visualizing in your mind. But you're playing that scale without actually having your hands on guitar and having to think about your picking hand. Then you're fretting hand picking hand than you're fretting hand every step of the way. It will improve your alternate picking as well. So really, there's nothing that this won't help. I find that, you know, in terms of strumming, keeping time and rhythm, that's more of a physical kind of groove thing. I don't buy them find visualization really helps with like maybe a complicated strumming pattern or some kind of groove related rhythmic thing. Those are better to kind of turn over to your, your intuitive body and actually do. But visualization is great for anything that's highly technical. If you're learning a very advanced technique, likes sweet picking or something like that, you try and do something very fast. It's very technical. Or you're trying to learn chord shapes or scales that are pushing the boundaries of what your dexterity is currently comfortably. Technical, things like that. Those are the best things to apply visualization to. Now lets continue on the course and see what else we can learn about it. 5. Practice Routine Design: All right, so now let's talk about what constitutes a good practice routine. My recommendation to my students is always whatever amount of time you can practice. 15 minutes, 30 minutes today, makes sure that you first of all, practice daily. It's better in practice five minutes a day, then practice for three hours on Sunday? Absolutely. Hands down. No question. It's better practice every day for a shorter period of time. So figure out how much time can you commit on a daily basis, then divide that time into three parts. The first part is going to be warm ups. The second part is going to be challenging work where you really try to learn something new. And then the final part is where you just play music camp flying, and you get back to the experience of actually being a guitarist. Those are the fundamentals of a good practice routine. Divide your time into three parts. Warm-ups, challenging work, and just playing music, and make sure that you practice daily. Okay, now in the next lesson, we want to talk a little bit more about some examples so you understand what warm-ups are. For example, let's move forward and talk about that in the next lesson. 6. Practice Recommendations: So what could we fill our warm up time with? Okay, so warm-up time, let's say would be playing a scale like this. Just play scales up and down the neck, something you know. If you don't know scales, well then that's not a good candidate. Maybe you would just strung chords that you know, that, you know, just warming up, just building dexterity where you want to get to and where I tried to get my students to as quickly as possible, is where they can play at least one scale, preferably say the major scale, be able to play the a major scale in all 12 keys. And that is, that's my favorite warm-up. It's just a great way to get started limber up your fingers. And of course it also builds your, your comfort with the fret board picking and your scales at the same time. Now when it gets to the middle phase, what are some of the things that we might want to work on? Well, it could be in the case of finger picking, maybe a new finger picking pattern in something new that's challenging. In the case of scales, maybe scales you don't know yet, or scales like a 3-3 node scales that sometimes people learn where they have to stretch their fingers more so on the fretboard, anything where you don't know it, but you want to learn it at something you're committed to learning. You spend that middle portion really focused on that work. It could be strumming, could be rid them trying to strum a complicated rhythm or mimic a favorite guitarist who's got a rhythm that you think sounds great, but you can't quite do breaking it down and then building it back up. And analyzing what's going on in music, doing music theory. What are the cords, how are they related? What notes are in those chords? Those would be all examples of things that we can do in that middle section. Just has to be something that you're committed to learning that you don't already know. Now what would you do in the final phase where you just play music the final third of your practice routine. Well, if you don't know any music, then you're kinda stuck. You know, you do your best to, I guess you strum some chords that you know. So you want to learn a song. You want to try to get quickly to the point where you know a song. But obviously if you know more, that's better. Playing along with jam tracks. Maybe even do link if you do know a scale or you know multiple scales. Doodle with some improvisation, just play scales against a jam track. Do something where it's experiential, it's not rational, you're not thinking so much, you're not. I'm trying to get yourself to expand and grow, but you're just using stuff that you know to actually make music and have that experience of the guitar in your hands and you're doing something with it musically. That's what that final phase of practices all amount. Now in the next lesson, I want to talk about how much time is enough time to practice so that you understand how to optimize your practice routine that way as well. 7. How Much is Enough?: Okay, so let's talk about how much time is enough time to practice. Now, different people have different schedules, right? So some folks are going to be able to practice in our day and they're going to see more gains than somebody who practices for 15 minutes a day. That's obvious. What we've talked about in this section is all about optimizing your practice routines. You can get the most out of it. So somebody who does visualization and has a properly structured practice routine will always do more person who practice 15 minutes a day and they're kind of aimless. They didn't really have a lot of structure versus somebody who does 15 minutes a day. And they have a practice rain scene structure, and they use visualization. That latter person will certainly progress significantly faster than the first person. But in terms of time, it really comes down to how much time do you have and how much time can you stay focused with children? I find that they generally can't stay focused on practicing something like an instrument for more than about 15 minutes. So I would recommend to a child that 15 minutes a day would be good practice for an adult. And they have more in the way of attention and focus, but they don't have as much time as kids do. So if you've got an hour a day, then practice in our day, I wouldn't really recommend doing much more than that unless you were actually just jamming with people. I mean, playing music, you can do that all day long. But in terms of practice routine, I wouldn't really recommend the people that they do much more than an hour. You want to do at least 15 minutes. You if you really are pressed, for some reason, you there's no way you could do 15 minutes a day, do five minutes a day, three minutes a day. But do something daily. Doing something every day is, is one of the most important fundamentals. And if you really don't have the time to do 15 minutes a day, which is my base recommendation to adults. Then do what you can, but do it every day. Figure out what is it even if it is three minutes a day, even if it's something that you visualize on your walk to the train station or a set of scales that you're just gonna play every morning when you get out of bed, you could play the scales five times, something, even if it's that small, if it's every day, you'll start noticing real improvement. So now I'm gonna move forward to the last lesson. We were pretty much done with the course, but in the conclusion, I want to frame up a project that would help you get yourselves on the rails with a great practice routine moving forward for the long term, really set you up nicely. I want to give you an example of a good practice routine and help you understand when you will have this practice routine ingrained. 8. Conclusion & Wrap-Up: So we've learned a lot in this course and this is the conclusion and wrap up, but I want to outline the requirements for really getting the most out of this course. So you want to practice a practice routine for about 21 days, okay? There's a general consensus that anything you do for 21 days becomes a habit. You want to get to the point. It becomes a habit. And that means every day you spend the same amount on it. We've talked about, figure out a time that you can manage. Maybe it's five minutes a day, maybe it's 15. I hope it's 15 minutes a day. Maybe if it's even an hour. But do it every day for 21 days, that's three weeks, Monday through Sunday. Every day. You do your practice routine. When you do your practice, your team, you split it into three parts. You start with a third of warm-up, follow it with a third of challenging work, and you wrap up with a third of just playing music. You want to start first getting some material to do warm ups like arpeggios, scales, modes, picking techniques. Anything that you can do that you have to do a lot of repetition of. You want to start building a stockpile of that for your warm-up phase. What to work on in the middle will that depends on your interest. Could be finger picking, could be improvisation, could be slides, bends, hammer ons, pull ofs, different kinds of scales, pentatonics, modes. It could be strumming patterns, learning complicated rhythms, how to play Latin rhythms, how to play upbeats, How to Play rather complicated 16th based or dotted 16th based rhythms. Looking at things that really challenge you to grow. And then you wrap up in your final part, you wanna make sure you have some stockpile of songs he can play. Maybe it's just jam tracks that you play a scale over. Could be as simple as that playing arpeggios ever, chord progressions, but want to be something that you don't have to think about. It's pretty easy for you. Maybe it's just strumming chords. It doesn't have to be hard. In fact, it shouldn't be hard. It should be something that you can do automatically. But set up a practice routine, decide how much time every day you can put into it every day and then commit that. You're going to do it for 21 days in a row. And I think at the end of that, you will have developed a good foundation for good practice routine. And if you incorporate the visualization that we've talked about earlier on in this course. In those practice routines, especially the middle part where you're learning new stuff. That's going to really help you optimize the amount of time that you spend practicing. So you get the most bang for your buck. And if there's any questions you have about any material we discovered or disgust, sorry, please bring it up with me. Please reach out to me. You can message me directly. I love to hear from students. If you have some constructive criticism of the course, please let me know. I'm happy to update the course and make modifications so that it's a better course. I don't mind criticism at all if it's something that I can act on to actually improve the course. I would also love to hear your positive feedback. So please consider reviewing the course and sending me your feedback. If you loved the course, I'd like to know what you liked about it, even if you have other topics that you wondering if I would be willing to teach, let me know. I'm always looking for new topics and ways to connect with my online audience as well. So thanks so much for joining me in this course. I look forward to seeing you elsewhere in my online trainings. And best of luck to you. Thanks so much.