Once we establish which are our weaknesses, we often find out they are many. When we are preparing for our playing session, what should we pick? In my opinion, it should be whatever you feel like practicing from your weaknesses. There are times when it’s better to follow a schedule, but often you get better results if you enjoy your practice time.

It’s all about experimenting since we are all different. Take tips from other people and ask yourself how that would apply to you. Don’t follow other’s practice routines, you are not them. Experiment and find out what works the best for you and do it.

The article also contains a nice story about Wilma Rudolph, which I found to be very inspirational. Check it out and follow the steps provided so you too can become a master guitarist.

My recommendation for when that happens is to simply take a break. Get away from the guitar for a couple of days. Go and experiment different things, maybe play another instrument or just listen to the sounds of nature. Look for inspiration everywhere.

Chances are your body just needs to relax a little. I mean, you do practice every single day, right? Just like when going to the gym, you need to stop every once in a while for your body to recover — and your mind also.

1. Play better. After warming up blood flow is a lot better on your hands. This means you can move them faster without much effort.
2. Avoid injuries. What do you think is worse, spending 10 minutes warming up or 3 months without playing guitar due to an injury? Yeah, I thought so.
3. Better technique. Because of the nature of the exercises you can use to warm up (I’m posting a link to some after this list)  you can often improve your technique. By using chromatics with patterns you are not used to playing, you will warm up your hands and fingers while improving your coordination and technique.

When warming up I usually spend some minutes going through chromatic patterns that are difficult for me to play, but I play them very slowly. This way I can make sure I play them perfectly thus improving my coordination while at the same time warming up.

I found a post over at the Mad Stratter blog that covers several warming up exercises of the chromatic type. You can find the post here.

Just remember, always warm up before playing your guitar and you will have a better playing session.

Technorati Tags: Guitar, practice

My advise is to look for hammer-ons and pull-off patterns that are difficult for you and practice those most of the time. Play them over and over again with a metronome or drum machine until you can play them perfectly, and I do mean perfectly, many times in a row. At that point, increase the speed a little bit and keep going until you can play the pattern at a good speed for you.

You should strive to practice things that are difficult for you most of the time because that’s the only way you’ll become a better guitar player. Your body doesn’t have to develop new capabilities if you are always asking it to play things it can already play.

Some patterns that are easy to play with a determined group of fingers are difficult to play with others so take that into consideration when looking for things to practice.

This pattern for example is very easy for me to play it with the index and ring finger, but when playing it with the middle and pinky finger it’s a whole different story. So I should practice the pattern with those fingers until I can play it without difficulties.

E||------------------------------------------|
B||------------------------------------------|
G||------------------------------------------|
D||--------------------------------5h-7------|
A||-------5h-7------5h-7------5h-7------5h-7-|
E||--5h-7------5h-7------5h-7----------------|

If you want example exercises you can download this guitar pro file I made for this article. It contains four exercises you should practice with all the finger combinations you can come up with.

Remember, you should practice your weak points most of the time, because you will improve your overall playing a lot faster. Also, when improving weak points your strong areas also improve so you become a better guitar player faster.

Technorati Tags: efficiency, Guitar, mastery, practice, progress

1. Communicate with other musicians. Regardless of instrument, music notation is the only universal music language that any other musician will understand. You can then write down your ideas so other musicians can learn them and you can do the same with their ideas.
2. Interpret songs without ever listening to them before. Because of the way music notation provides pitch and rhythm, you are able to interpret complete pieces of music on the fly. Imagine how cool it would be to pull off a gig without even knowing which songs you were going to play.
3. Credibility. The fact that you know how to read music tells people you are better prepared than other musicians because of the work this involves.
4. Become more flexible. You can adapt to many different situations and genres. This is an invaluable asset for any musician, for example when working as a session player you can go there and play your parts without further explanation.
5. Interpret pieces arranged for other instruments. Ever heard beautiful violin pieces and thought you would like to play them? Finding good tabs for these is hard, but the music notation is generally available.

Now that you know several advantages to why you should learn to read music on guitar, I want to share with you an excellent method I bought and I’m studying. It’s called A Modern Method for Guitar and it’s released by Berklee Press. This method will not only teach you how to read, but it’ll also develop your theory knowledge, fretboard awareness, and guitar technique.

The method is very well designed and builds skills gradually so you keep using them on every chapter of the book. You will have to dedicate time to practicing, maybe half an hour a day, but I can assure you after going through this method you will be able to read music on guitar. Besides, the fact that it is published by one of the best music universities in the world says it must be good.

Take a look at the reviews on Amazon and buy this book, I guarantee you won’t regret it.

Technorati Tags: Guitar, practice, progress

Establishing your goals is a huge step towards success, but you can go even further. Writing down your goals will definitely help you achieve them quicker.

The way I do it is I have a white board on my bed room. On this white board I have three lists: Goals, Week Goals, and Today’s Goals.

1. The Goals list contains the goals I want to achieve currently. They can be very big. Even things that will take months or years are there.
2. The Week Goals list contain some smaller goals that contribute to my main Goals. So if I wanted to learn the notes on the fretboard, then a week goal could be to learn the notes on the first five frets for example.
3. Finally, the Today’s Goals list is consequently a list of goals that can be achieved in that day and that will make me accomplish my week goals when the week ends. Elaborating on the previous example, a goal for today could be to learn the first fret’s notes. At the end of the week I would have learned all notes in the first five frets.

This way of working will make you always have your goals present and you will always be advancing in the quest to their achievement. If every day you make a new list of goals that will contribute to your weekly goals then you will accomplish all those weekly goals. Therefore, eventually all these weekly goals will add up and you will achieve your main goals.

I encourage you to try out this method for a couple of months and keep track of all the things you have accomplished. When looking at the log, you’ll realize you will have progressed a lot more than if you just had goals in your mind and a heck of a lot more than if you didn’t have any goals at all.

Technorati Tags: mastery, Mind, progress

Photo by: martinhoward - flickr

Music theory knowledge is very helpful when playing guitar and improvising. However, it is only useful if you can recall its concepts immediately. For example, say you’re playing on the key of Bm, what chords are in that key? Are you going to think about the formula for chords of the minor scale? Can you do this before the song ends? You also need to know which notes compose that scale. Do you know without thinking twice?

This is very common indeed. Lots of guitar players understand music theory but can’t apply it because they haven’t had enough experience applying the concepts in order to stick them in their minds. Basically, you use it so much that you have memorized all those concepts.

But wait a minute, there’s gotta be a better way to do this, right? We don’t want to have to wait all that time to be able to apply our knowledge. Well, there is a better way.

Using an SRS

An SRS, spaced repetition system, is basically a program that makes you remember things in increasing time intervals. This helps a lot when you want to have a concept in long term memory. It actually resembles flash cards in that you have to input questions and an answers.

The way it works is the following:

1. You input your questions and answers to the SRS. For example, a question could be, what are the notes on a Cmaj7 chord? And the answer would be C E G B.
2. The program then asks you a random question you inputted before and you answer it to yourself.
3. You check the answer and see if you had it correct.
4. If you did then you press the ‘correct’ button.
5. When you answer correctly a question, the program will then ask you that question in a longer time frame, making it longer every time you answer that question correctly.
6. If you answer the question incorrectly the program will ask you that question more frequently until you get it correct.

Some SRS programs available include jMemorize for every platform, and Anki for the mac.

This method really works and it ensures you always have the concepts fresh in your mind, which gives you a very big advantage when playing your instrument. Give it a try and tell me about your results.

Good Luck!

Technorati Tags: memorization, Music Theory

Photo by: Metal Chris - Flickr

Lately I’ve been analyzing and really just thinking a lot more about the way I do things in regards to practicing my instrument. I like shred. I like the pure speed and aggressiveness of its sound. But it seems like my brain or body decided I was to get stuck on a certain speed, or at least I thought so.

You see, when practicing for building speed more often than not I practiced the same rhythmic groupings, 16th note triples (6 notes for every beat). This type of practice held me at about 120 bpm or 720 notes per minute. Which I think is good, but I wanted more.

I began to consider that maybe this “block” could be mental and not physical. I mean, why would it be physically impossible for me to go any faster than that while so many players doing it all the time? So I began to experiment, and my results were pretty interesting.

The first thing to consider is that if I always practiced the same kind of things, why would I get any different results? So the first point is our mind needs variety in order to get better in any skill at least related to playing an instrument, one area can stall the progress of another. This was confirmed when I was experimenting with rhythmic groupings when I could play effortlessly a lick on 16th note triplets at 100 bpm but I couldn’t play the same lick at 200 bpm on 8th note triplets. It’s exactly the same amount of notes at exactly the same speed, but I couldn’t play it. My mind had never tried to play anything on so high tempos, even if it had done what is needed to play that specific lick before, it couldn’t process this new environment. So yes, we need to work on different things in order to get different results. From now on, practice a lot of rhythmic groupings, even odd numbers like 5 and really just spice up your practice with new things.

Then I thought that if these limits were on my mind and not on my body, I could definitely play what I thought I couldn’t if my mind got used to it. So I began playing at 130 bpm, a speed I could never play at before. At first it was sloppy and I couldn’t get it right on time, but I continued. After a while it started to get easier until my mind finally understood it and enabled me to do it. I’m still practicing at that speed in order to polish it because it’s not perfect yet, but it was a pretty nice gain for one day of practice. So point number two is the following: once in a while, dare to go higher. I’m not saying always practice at speeds you can’t currently play, because doing it very often will then program you brain to play sloppily, but do it some times so your brain knows this new environment of playing, it needs to get used to it, and that will happen only if it is exposed to it.

Apply this new knowledge to your playing and practice. I can guarantee it will help you progress way faster. The mind is very powerful, but we need to understand what it needs in order to take advantage of all that power.

Technorati Tags: Guitar, Mind, practice, progress, speed

Photo by: Alvin Carpio - Flickr

As musicians almost all of us have a favorite genre which consequently is what we play most of the time. That’s not a bad thing, it actually is good to concentrate on one specific genre so we can become really good at it. Now, because we enjoy playing that music style, we tend to also listen to it most of the time, after all, it is what we like the most.

The problem with this approach

Maybe at some point of your life you have felt that everything you compose or play begins to sound very similar. That should be no surprise. You play and listen to that style most of the time. The musical ideas are repeated throughout what you listen to and what you experiment with, so why should it sound any different? That’s right, it won’t.

I know you can be very creative and get a lot of mileage out of just some tools, but if you keep doing the same, chances are this will happen to you at one point or another. So what should you do in order to avoid or correct this?

Listen to More Music Styles

Listening to more varied music genres will expose you to other ideas you might have never considered before. Maybe even the use of other instruments which you didn’t know existed.

Several musical geniuses,such as Guthrie Govan and Sting, acknowledge gathering inspiration from very uncommon sources. They listen to music from other cultures, which gives them the opportunity to get to hear new sounds. This new sounds can then be embraced and adapted into their music, which will undoubtedly give it a new and fresh flavor.

You can do this too. Just listen to music you had never heard before. Go far from your roots and listen to asian music or african music (unless you are either, but you get my point). There is a very good chance that you will like at least one element of what you hear and that element could become part of your personal signature as a musician and artist.

Technorati Tags: Inspiration