The Best Practice Technique, Ever.

If I were to give the best practice technique ever, it would be this: Variation.

Take the same exact thing that you are practicing, be it a chord progression, a lead guitar lick, or a scale, and practice it in as many different ways as possible.

Doing this strengthens the synapses needed to execute the skill faster. The synapses become coated with more Myelin, and because the circuit is more insulated, the skill becomes faster.

Last night, I was helping a student practice variations of the chord progression D to A. I asked him to play on different strings, different frets, different tempos.

Of all the practice techniques I know, just this one will make you a 10X better guitar player.

Hit me up to learn how to apply variations to your guitar practice routine!

When Not To Practice (and how to figure out when to move forward)

As guitarists, we are constantly subjected to a restless energy that pervades our personal, practicing lives: The need to always get “better” at guitar. As a result, countless people are burning themselves out from this wonderful instrument!

I have seen plenty of students make practicing guitar into a super heavy commitment. Anyone who is familiar with my teaching method knows that I only assign practice exercises that can be completed in under five minutes of practice each day. The result is this: We tend to get more momentum with smaller, more targeted amounts of practice.

Sometimes however, we have to be mindful of how we are practicing because in no other activity on guitar do we spend so much time relating to the instrument. Sure there’s performance, but how many beginners are interested in that? My point is, sometimes we take practicing guitar a little too seriously and we need to chill out!

The following are four situations where I think it would be a smart idea to practice less, or even not to practice at all. Let’s jump in!

Don’t practice guitar when life is overwhelming you

Do you need any reminder about this? Life is challenging enough without adding extra weight in which might complicate things.

When my father died, I didn’t bother to even think about practicing. Rather, I let it go and allowed myself to grieve naturally. When I was ready, I found myself back in the saddle and practicing with gusto.

Don’t practice guitar when you’re extremely tired

Again, we can say this is common sense. Practicing guitar is a mentally heavy activity. Why go at it when we are tired?

Lately, I’ve been getting into my studio early in the morning. I’ve found that I can get more done when I’m fresher and have experienced less in a day. There are times however when I just need sleep and I forced myself to get to the studio only to realize that I just wanted to take a nap! It’s better just to take the nap and come back later.

Don’t practice guitar when your hand, or any part of your body is hurting

Many times, we practice more and more and more for no good reason, which is misguided. That saying “No Pain No Gain” doesn’t apply to guitar. It’s the type of instrument that will punish you if you try to practice it and ignore pain.

As a graduate student at the Eastman School of Music, studying classical guitar, I often put in 6-8 hours of practice every single day. I would ignore pain, and as a result my body felt fatigued with practice. That experience came close to ruining my relationship with guitar, which I believe is far more important than “being good at guitar.”

Don’t practice guitar if you’re feeling a lot of tension in your body

One reason I love music is because it offers me a chance to just relax and enjoy the music I’m playing. Why on earth would I want to make that very enjoyable experience into a tension-filled one?

One student I worked with years ago often practiced with so much tension that she stopped feeling like it was fun anymore. She played with so much tension that she was unable to play without it. Technique on the guitar can be built on tension, but the problem is you’ll need that tension to be able to play what you practiced.

In conclusion

It’s not often that you’ll want to put the guitar down, especially after you get some momentum on the instrument! But sometimes, staying still and not approaching it is the best way to get better and to enjoy playing it.

Micro-Practicing: The Most Underrated Way to Practice Guitar

One of the most commonly heard adages that guitar teachers are fond of is this idea of practicing "an hour every day." I think this advice is the product of an un-enlightened tradition of music educators who's ideas aren't in line with the expectations of who they are teaching.

What is really interesting to me is this ratio:

The amount of time you practice : How interested you are in the instrument.

What I find truly crazy is how guitar teachers will berate a student for not practicing an hour when he or she is brand new. What's completely insane is that guitar teachers haven't figured out exactly what that student must do in that entire hour anyways!

What I mean is this: Just because you practice five hours a day doesn't mean you're actually getting anywhere. Don't believe me?

Lessons From Graduate School Guitar Programs

In graduate school, learning classical guitar at the Eastman School of Music, I practiced no less than 6 hours per day. I taught beginners who were just starting to learn the instrument and I told them this:

As long as you come to your lesson each week, you'll get an A. If you skip one, you get a B, and so on and so forth. Attendance based.

The idea was to experiment with how much time they really needed to practice guitar and get more interested in it. This was at Alfred University, about an hour or so south of Rochester NY. Most of the students thrived with this format. There were a few students who found out they weren’t at all interested in guitar, but after they dropped the class I'm sure they felt a lot better.

I noticed a pattern: The more a student got into guitar and made it his/her own, the more time they spent practicing. The more we are interested in guitar, the more we'll practice it.

To expect a brand new student, someone who has never played guitar before but is looking to try it out, how can we expect them to create an extra hour of time for practicing guitar when even they don't even know if they want to continue?

This is exactly the reason why micro-practicing at the very beginning of learning guitar is absolutely essential. If a person's interest in guitar slowly grows, the amount of time grows naturally and organically. Best of all, I never told them they had to put in outrageous amounts of time.

In other words, five minutes of practice each day is totally doable.

Deep Roots

Learning is about growth.

Learning is about growth. When you think about what growth is, when you try to define it, what comes to mind?

If you’re like most people, growth happens upwards. Our economy grows upwards, our skills grow upwards, our financial well-being grows upwards (if we have the right attitude about it, of course).

AS a lifelong guitarist and a teacher for more than a decade, it seems to me that growth happens in many different ways. I think of it like trees:

Tree will grow…

1. Upwards

2. Thicker

3. Downwards

Three Types of Growth In Guitar

Growth upwards is one the we are most familiar with, as guitarists. We grow to play faster, more songs, better technique, and so on.

Growth that is thicker is less familiar for most guitarists. This is growth where we look to learn different genres of guitar. Where we purposely challenge ourselves to learn a new style of playing, something that is alien to us currently. A good example would be a punk rock guitarist deciding to learn jazz guitar.

Grow that goes downwards is something that is incredibly unfamiliar for most guitarists. This is a different type of growth, and the type of growth I most concern myself with as a teacher and life-long musician. It’s simple: Growing deeper roots means stabilizing how we practice and how we approach guitar.

An example is this: If we wish to get faster at a certain passage, we not only try to learn the passage, but we learn the techniques of working on that process over time, we work on trying different ways of playing (or in my world, workflows).

It is my sincere wish for all guitarists to know exactly how fun it is to have deep roots, to be able to practice and learn anything, to be able to solve one’s own problems. We can always learn more stuff on guitar, but it’s learning how to practice and how to adjust our process where the real fun comes in.

Try watching TV when practicing

Though I really hate to admit it, practicing guitar could be a whole lot easier if we watched TV while doing it. Why?

When we first learn something new, it is at the cognitive level. Unless we have Super-Man-esque concentration levels, we need a distraction. Thankfully, there is Seinfeld and Parks and Recreation reruns. After we learn something new, we need to play it, not just understand it.

Try this out for starters:

Try learning two new chord progressions. It could be something easy like say: G-Bminor-A-E (the Bminor is thrown in there because it isn't the most used chord in pop music). Or it could be something more in line with where you are at with your skill level. Then just sit down on the couch, watch your favorite Indiana Jones movie, and then when it gets to the part where Indiana Jones is punching some evil dude, check on your progress (which is like every three minutes in those movies).

Voila. Watching TV gives your brain a break, and allows your fingers to get more nimble at playing guitar.