Making another new start on the practice regime, how are you going with yours?

Since fall has arrived my things to do list has become less concentrated. The yard maintenance has eased a bit and I finished many projects this summer. Since then I have started back up with my practice regiment that I basically ended when everything started growing. I have reintroduced some of my technique practice routines as well as inserting more of my theoretical training into my guitar playing. Getting some of that stuff under my fingers has proven to be very time consuming. I spend about an hour working on technique and then put as much time into figuring out the shapes and picking techniques to put the theoretical stuff onto the fingerboard as I can. Some days minutes and some days hours. There's never enough time so all I can do is hammer on it when I can, for as long as I can, before some unwelcome distraction comes along to put an end to it.

One of these days there will be another album project for me to record guitar parts for from my old bandmate in Japan. He told me mid summer there would be another one coming in the Fall.

I thought I would look back and review how I was going with my practicing compared to the original post.


Have continued working through the Mickey Baker book, transposing all the exercises into several keys and trying to come up with a solo over each piece, using the chord tones and alterations. Pleased with the progress so far, but am still in the front half the book.

Have taken onbroad the lesson where he recommends playing the "jazz chords" to replace the normal, simple chords in songs. I have a Jazz Standards fake book that I brought for another purpose which I am working my way through doing as he suggested.

Haven't kept up with the Open Studio Jazz lessons due to spending the time practicing songs for the various groups that I play with.

Also I now have an ambition to get up and play bass at a local monthly Jazz jam night so I have an immediate goal of learning some of the tunes usually played there, like Blue Bossa, Blue Monk, All blues and the like.

Haven't deviated too far from the goals I set with the practice regime, so pretty happy.

Yesterday was a good day. I practiced for 6 hours. I started at 10:30 AM and finished when my wife got home from work at about 4:30. All I did was play guitar, be the doorman for the dogs, drink coffee and pee. I didn't even eat. Who would have ever thought to use playing guitar as a weight loss program?

It felt good to know that I still have the ability to first, play that long, and second, get lost in it and completely lose track of time for hours and hours. I hadn't done that for a long long time. I needed that. It was reassuring to find I still get that much enjoyment and am still fascinated with finding things I didn't know how to do and LOVE the process of figuring it out. I was in my own little world. That's how I depressurize from the monotonous and unpleasant everyday crap I have to take care of around here all of the time. I have had so much of that stuff to do lately that I hadn't even picked my guitar up to practice in over a month and it was wearing on me. I'm so excited about the new stuff I learned yesterday that it has inspired me to practice again today. I'm going to go do that now and stop wasting time on here. i just had to tell someone who would appreciate it.

Now, stop reading this and go play yer guitar.

So here I am again, after making good progress with the Mickey Baker book, getting up to lessson 42 and on track to finish it by the end of the year, it came to a stop in May due to work committments.

Yesterday I started with some revision, back at lesson 3 !

Dedication is the key. As long as you are committed it doesn't really matter how long it takes.

At this point in my playing career I am more focused on my technique than I am the content. I want to be able to execute the stuff I hear in my head and my technique is sometimes not up to the task. I need to focus on technique for awhile. Later I'll go back to content. That's not something I usually have a problem with.

I am trying to improve my economy picking when playing lead lines across multiple strings. I had some limited ability to do that for years but only in one direction across the strings. Going from low strings up to the higher pitched ones wasn't that much of a problem but going in the other direction was all but impossible for me. I wrote myself an exercise about 6 weeks ago that accented doing that as well as going in the direction I could already do somewhat. When I started I had to slow it down to 1/4 note triples at 45 beats per minute. That was the speed I had to play it at so there weren't any mistakes. I have been working on that every day for sometimes hours. Today I hit 160 BPM when playing 1/8 note triplets. I fudged a little at the end of my last practice session and put the metronome at 180 BPM to see if I could do it. I did but it was very sloppy. When I slowed back down to 160 it was perfect. I am not as concerned about being able to play that fast but when I work up through all of the tempos getting to the fast ones I can play the slower ones flawlessly. THAT'S what I'm all about. Developing some headroom in my technique.

I usually have 3 or 4 technical things I am working on at any one time and I move back and forth between them as I am practicing so I'm not always using the same muscles in the same ways. If I start feeling fatigue I move onto something else and come back to what I had been working on later in the session. It seems to be working. I was at 120 BPM last Sunday and today I hit 160 with no issues but I have probably practiced for 15 hours this week. I have to take advantage of the time when I can do that. I often get busy and may go days or weeks without even picking up a guitar. I have practiced so much this week that it is starting to feel easy again after neglecting it all summer long. I love that.

Don't focus on scales, learn SONGS. From the beginning to the end. Scales are nice warmups but not musical. Once you start learning to play a complete song - beginning to end - you'll unlock a lot of secrets. And you'll start developing the skills you need to be a working player if that is your goal.

Too many students feel that learning technique will make them musical. Makes them good at noodling and not much else.

Instead of learning scales, learn songs and then understand how that song is applying the theory, even if the person who wrote it didn't realize it.

Leaning the entire song will teach you ear training and discipline. That leads to musical maturity you can use for improvisation, like hearing the bass player leading you in a new direction, or a subtle change in the groove by the drummer.

When you do practice scales, do not just play them as a fingering exercise - listen to it and understand it's vibe and where it would be useful, i.e., not "How do I play this?" but instead "Where can I use this?"