Practice Tips

Here are some tips to help you with good general practice:

• Go for 7 days a week practice, but be happy with 5!
• Practise a quarter of your time on technique areas, which include:
• Scales, (if you only know one, play it in 3 or 4 different places)
• Chords, (learn one new one as often as possible – be proactive and learn it BEFORE you need it!)
• Problem Bars in a new piece, (work on these for a few days without playing the whole piece – it takes less time and frees you up to play other stuff)
• Keep a list of music that you can play and each week review the list so that you can expand the number of pieces played.
• Practise technique EVERY TIME you pick up your guitar – I guarantee that you’ll want to play it for longer once you start.

Don’t spend time agonising over whether to play it, or for how long...

Just do it!

Specific Practice

Play program

1. Sort repertoire into lists of 7 numbers
2. Take 1 song/number per day and practise any difficult section
3. Take the ‘offending’ difficult section and practise x 20 SLOWLY
4. Then play the bar before and after it x 10 SLOWLY
5. Put the bars back in the piece and repeat.
6. Repeat this the next day until it's up to the speed of the whole piece. (This could take weeks but will be much faster than playing the whole piece from the beginning every time!)

Technique program

1. Scales and arpeggios – 1 day fast, 1 day slow, every other day with metronome
2. Chords – Choose 1 ‘Buskers’ piece and play, after preparing for 1 minute
3. Technique – Speed timing: practise 1 riff at least 3 b.p.m. faster each day (USE THE METRONOME)
4. Don’t give up!
   

Good practicing