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.

Buy a guitar at a guitar shop, or buy online?

Buy a guitar at a guitar shop, or buy online?

Perhaps you've heard the call from local businesses in your area, "Support your local business." The greatest advantage that you have in doing just so with a guitar shop is that you can get a ton of perks that you won't get from buying a guitar online.

The most obvious perk you get is a reassurance that returning the guitar will not be that big of a hassle. Just drive back to the guitar store, and ask for a refund. It's never a bad idea to chck out the store policy on returning guitars. How long of a period do you have? Will you get a refund of cash/credit card, or will you get store credit? Get this in writing.

The less obvious perk is getting the guitar set up for you. I've rarely bought a guitar from a guitar shop without them offering to set up the guitar for me. They know that online guitar sales businesses can't really set up a guitar just for you, and in doing so they will likely earn repeat business. I can't blame them. Honestly, I have my favorite guitar shops that I go to because their customer service can't be beat. 

The other extreme advantage of going to a guitar shop is that the people who work there are full of information that they want to share with you. Ask them any question about guitars, and they will share. If you are a naturally curious person, you'll find that talking to guitar shop employees to be great fun.

The disadvantages, I believe, are far outweighed by the advantages. Since online guitar dealers tend to have massive warehouses where they can store a ton of guitars, amps, accessories, and because most of them try to have a worldwide presence without having a storefront, their prices are so much cheaper than local guitar shops. This one advantage cannot possibly compete with the experience of a guitar shop, a helpful employee, and a new guitar that since you held it you fell in love with it.  

My recommendation if you are a beginner to guitar? Buy a guitar from a guitar shop, and skip buying online altogether, at least for your first guitar.

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.

How A 15 Year Old Learned Fingerpicking Inside And Out

For the sake of privacy, I've changed the name of the person in this success story.

I've been working with Nancy since she was about 10 years old. I normally don't like to work with kids that are this young because my curriculum was designed for adults. Nancy, however, was not a normal kid. She has oodles of creativity, is a fearless performer, is about 10 times smarter than I am, and she's a quick learner.

Nancy originally came in for a lesson about five years ago. We learned the basic stuff: Strumming, chords, and how to do lots of nifty things like mute strumming (our favorite jam was Horse With No Name by America, which is full of mute strums). She disliked learning songs like Dead Flowers because it wasn't exactly in line with her generation. Since I am an older dude, I constantly dropped millennial sayings just to get her to practice and work harder, and she'd give me a quizzical, almost annoyed look. I'll do a lot for progress, even if it means I'm making fun of myself.

It is fun watching her learn. Through working with her and her parents really closely, she started to get really interested in learning to write songs. Last year, as she was learning over Skype (yes, that's possible too), she managed to write at least one song per week. Being the type of teacher I am, I thought to myself "What sorts of things can I teach her that will be helpful for her as she writes songs?" On the sly, I started showing her possibly the hardest fingerpicking exercises in the classical guitar repertoire, Giuliani's 120 Exercises for the Right Hand. These exercises aren't difficult in the traditional sense; They just need attention, and to be perfectly honest they are dry and boring. I basically started to use the warm-up time in each lesson to show her a new fingerpicking pattern. This started roughly a year ago.

Through about a years worth of lessons, I've managed to show her about 40 different patterns, all college-level classical guitar. She didn't like them at first, but she got to expect them as part of the guitar lesson experience. Not too long ago I started to randomly play Landslide by Fleetwood Mac. She said, "You must show me this right now!" I did, and she played it beautifully without me really having to coach her through it. The fingerpicking exercises paid off. Imagine my surprise when she basically started writing fingerpicking songs! Her creativity is boundless, and shes a fearless performer. It has been a trip to watch her grow into a strong and highly-capable guitarist, and basically on less than five minutes a day, too. We never spent more than five minutes each lesson doing these fingerpicking exercises. It was fantastic, and I'm so proud of her.

Success Story: How A Busy High School Principal Learned Guitar on Five Minutes A Day

Out of respect for the student I am writing about, I have changed his name to Patrick.

One thing that blows a lot of people's minds is when I tell them they can learn on five minutes a day. As you'll see in this success story, my friend Patrick managed to do it despite having an excessively busy schedule.

Patrick is a rare breed of human. He is an avid outdoorsman, spending tons of time in Colorado. He shared a story once of how he climbed a major mountain in two or three days. He was obsessed with coaching basketball teams, and he loved traveling to Las Vegas. He is now retired, but when we were working together it wasn't at all uncommon for him to work 70 or 80 hour weeks. And yet, he wanted to learn to play guitar.

The first lesson, he told me he was auditioning two other guitar instructors and was going to pick the best one. I was delighted and gratified when he picked me! Here's what we did right off the bat: We worked on strumming. I showed him each of about 15 different strumming patterns that were easy to master. I purposely set them up this way so that the student's momentum can be built up. Then, we started playing songs. My favorite first song is undoubtedly Tugboat by Galaxie 500. When he learned that, he finally had what he was looking for: The first inking that he could play guitar and really enjoy it.

We worked on the chords next. Rather than teach him all the chords at once, we worked on only the ones we needed for the songs he wanted to play. And yes, there were a lot of them. He asked to learn how to play The Travelin Wilburies' End Of The Line. Easy! D, A, and G. Once he learned it, he was completely psyched. Mind you, I only gave him suggestions to practice that would take five minutes a day to practice. He got this song within three months, and this was after he learned Dead Flowers by The Rolling Stones and Last Kiss by Pearl Jam.

Patrick didn't stop there. He asked for Tom Petty song after Tom Petty song. I became really well-versed in Tom Petty! And whenever we tried to learn something new, all I did was smooth out the road and make sure that the practicing never exceeded five minutes a day. That is my solemn promise to all students: I will never ask for more than five minutes of practice each day.

Patrick has since moved onto other endeavors in life (retirement being one of them). We still keep in touch because it's fun to talk. I hope we get to hang out really soon because it's always a blast to hear what he's up to.

So, what do you want to do on guitar? What do you want to play?

How To Nail A Hard Strumming Pattern

Guitar Closeup by Jordan Drazen, Attribution 2.0 Generic

Yesterday, I worked with a brand new student. She was such a natural with guitar that I barely had to help her learn strumming. She was so able to get into the flow of strumming that all I ended up doing was simple:

1. Show her the strumming pattern
2. Play the mp3
3. Play along with her

In a matter of an hour, she went from never having played a song to playing Tugboat by Galaxie 500. It was a blast!

So, what does that have to do with strumming in general? For many of us, strumming can be a challenge. When strumming does become a challenge for you, I have a couple of suggestions:

1. Play the strumming pattern at a slightly lower tempo. If you play it well, take it slowerthan that.
2. When you get as slow as you can go and you're close to making a mistake, stay at that tempo. That tempo is where you'll get your best practicing in.
3. Take the strumming pattern faster, and faster, and try to top it out at just a little faster than the original tempo.

sale

Metronome 10 - Workflow

Sale Price:$1.49 Original Price:$1.99

Add To Cart

Strumming need not be hard, but one mistake that many beginners make is the idea that it must be fast, right out of the gate. Don't do this! Take your time and slow down, more, and even more. This helps you get your mechanics together. Then, once you speed it up afterwords, you'll get your flow. Finally, when you play the strumming pattern at the desired tempo, it'll be with mastery.

Not all of us are naturals like my student was yesterday, but that doesn't mean we have to struggle with practicing. Adjust your approach, and you'll learn quicker.

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.

An Interesting Idea

Guitar Sleeping Prank

I'm late to the pop-culture party (as usual). Though it's a little disturbing to watch, I can't look away: