What Should I Practice?

In the previous post in the series, I outlined how to not just blindly follow a set practice routine, but to create your own unique routine based on your specific goals. It’s really no good just saying “I’m going to practice alternate picking for 6 hours a day, because that’s what I heard John Petrucci/Steve Vai/Yngwie Malmsteen did!”. That may have worked for them, but wouldn’t you rather know will work best for you? I hate to break it to you, but you are not Yngwie Malmsteen (or anyone else for that matter) and you will never play exactly the same way as he does (that doesn’t mean you’ll never be as good…). You need to play like yourself.

How do you Know what to Improve?

Now, this isn’t always what your guitarist friends want you to improve, it’s what you want to be better at! What I mean by that is: there is a lot of peer pressure about in guitar circles when it comes to being able to “shred”. Many people will tell you that you need to work on technique for 90% of the time- and this is simply not true!

The truth is that there are more aspects to being a great guitarist than just having great technique. Technique is only one thing to practice out of many. A good practice routine will also include a fair amount of memorising songs, chords, and scales for example, and you might also want to practice improvisation or transcription (tabbing things out).

How to find out where You Suck

I’m not saying that you suck as a guitarist, but we all (yes, all of us, even I have to admit to that) have areas of our playing that are weaker than others. The question is: how do we find these areas in order to target them?

Firstly, you have to accept that you’re never going to be able to work on each technique equally (although you probably want to try). It’s just too difficult- and I’m not even talking about making tie for it in your routine- but how do you gauge how good you are at, say, legato?

It would be good if you could just put a number, a measurement to it! Then I could say to you “oh, I’m level 9 legato” and you’d know exactly how well I could play. Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way. So how do you know how good you are at a certain technique? The answer is: are you good enough to play the songs you want to play? It’s not the other way around- you don’t often choose songs because they are difficult or easy, but you’re probably going to want to play that song you’ve been hearing on the radio, or the title track to your favourite album, right?

Play a Song

So what I suggest you do is: go ahead and attempt to learn that song, or any song you want. When you get to a difficult section write down the name of the techniques being used at that point, and the speed. If you constantly do this you’ll end up with a list of things that you need to practice, and you’ll be able to isolate problem areas. If the same things come up several times in different songs then write down how many times you come across the “impossible” part.

If you do this between now and next week (when the next post comes out) you’ll end up with a list of “things that you sucks at”. Don’t let this put you off though, even if your list of difficult things is huge, you’ve taken the first step to fixing them. Now you’ll know exactly what areas you’ll need to focus on in practice time, and you’ll be ready for the next step: planning the practice routine.

Next week I’ll tell you how to use the information you’ve gathered to plan your own unique practice routine.
Rob.

May 6, 2011 at 8:00 am | Practicing and Practice Routine | No comments