Practice Schedule

So, over the last week you should have created a list of things to practice (and if you haven’t read last weeks post, I suggest you read that first). This week we’ll be doing the complicated bit: putting together a personalised practice routine just for you.

I know some practise routines that you find on the Internet give you an exact thing to be practising for an exact time, but this one will be different. The aim here is to give you the tools to create your own practice routine.

First, take a look at this chart- this will form the basis of your routine. As you can see, there are three modules: Warm-up, Focused Learning, and Creative Learning and each one is taken from the three point plan. This time I’ve also divided each “point” into several sections, so let me take you through each one.

The Warm-up

Obviously this part comes first, as if you haven’t warmed up, your fingers just wont work properly! I’ve further broken down this section into three parts, each one relating to a specific technique: Picking, Legato, and Fingerpicking. Feel free to add more sections if you want, but I’ve specifically chosen these three because they work on the muscles you’ll need “waking up” in order to play guitar.

Warming up with picking will (obviously) wake up your picking hand, but also your brain will need to keep both hands co-ordinated (brains count as muscles, right? Well, you know what I mean…); legato (hammer-ons and pull-offs) will especially work on the muscles of your fretting hand, as they are the ones “hammering” or “pulling” the string; finally, fingerpicking will work on the muscles controlling your picking hand’s fingers. I think that covers most of it, if you think of anything else then I would love to hear your comments below!

Next, do you have that list I told you to make, of all the things you would like to be able to do, but can’t? That’s what you’ll be using to create the parts in the next sections- as this practise routine needs to be focused around you and your goals, so it requires your list of unique targets!

Focused Learning

This next section is based on the idea that you’re practising five days a week and have two days (the weekend?) off. I did it this way because I know so many people who are in a routine on weekdays (with school, or work etc.) which then breaks down on weekends. I also know some people who are the opposite (only have time at weekends to practise), or some people who practise everyday. You can really adjust how many “days” are in this section depending on how many days you have to practice. If you need more than five days worth, I suggest taking a look at the guitar essentials series on YouTube to get some ideas- I recommend adding “theory” as a section here. Again, these sections should be based on the list you created from last week of all the things that you wish to improve.

If all you can manage is a weekend, or- even worse- only one day a week, well you might have to work on different things each week. E.g. if you had six parts to this section you could do two a week (a Saturday and a Sunday) for three weeks and then repeat it. If you’ve only got one day to practice then you might want to cut down on the number of different things here, and really focus on what you especially want to improve. Of course, it might only be strumming chords that you want to be good at, but I would definitely suggest having other things like listening and possibly theory or scales in there somewhere.

This is getting to be a bit of a long post, so I’ll continue this next week with the “creative learning” section, and we’ll have a look at an example routine. Read it here.
Rob.

May 13, 2011 at 8:00 am | Practicing and Practice Routine | No comments