How I practice
Reading the comments about practicing this week has been quite interesting for me. Mainly because I lived out what a lot of you are saying. For years. Not long after I got a band going, I let true practice fall by the wayside. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t playing my guitar. It’s just that I wasn’t practicing.
I was writing, which is a good thing, and probably neglected by many guitar players.
I was rehearsing a lot, working on parts, etc.
I was recording. (You end up playing guitar a LOT when recording, probably more than at any other time.)
I was performing. (Sorry to leave behind the alliterative ‘R’ theme here!)
And when I wasn’t doing any of the above, I would play at home to “keep my chops up”. This consisted of a whole lot of mindless noodling while watching TV, making sure I wouldn’t be rusty the next time we had a show.
You can probably figure out where I’m going. While all of the above are important things, none of them are true practicing. And while I have definitely improved over the last decade or so, much of that improvement has been incidental. My timing has gotten better, my tone has gotten better, etc. just from the result of playing in a lot of different situations But how much more improvement would I have seen had I truly practiced?
A while back I saw Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian. It is a must watch for anyone in a creative profession. Seinfeld talked about an “aha” moment he had while watching some construction workers out his office window. Those guys show up to work every day. Seinfeld took that as a challenge for him to do the same with writing material: show up and work every day. That image was very powerful for me, and I’ve tried to apply it to both songwriting and practicing my guitar.
(I also read a great book called Mastery. I’ll save that for another post!)
So for the last year or so, I’ve been really practicing. What follows is a general rundown of how I practice. While it’s by no means the only way to go about it, hopefully it will make sense enough for you to use it! (Bear in mind also that I travel a lot and I have young kids. If you’re in a different situation, you might be able to go all Steve Vai on everybody and practice 12 hours a day. Good luck with that…)
1) I leave a couple of guitars laying around the house in places where I will almost literally trip over them. For me this is the opposite of ?out of site, out of mind”. This way, practicing is incorporated into my everyday routine.
2) Instead of practicing for one long session, I practice multiple times a day in short ten to twenty minute increments. There are plusses and minuses to this approach. I do lose the advantages of longer periods of concentration, and I have to warm up for a couple of minutes each time. But by practicing in shorter bursts, my total practice time is increased, I don’t get burned out, and I don’t drive my family crazy!
3) I am blessed to have a wife who can tune out my noodling, so my main time to practice scales and other more mundane exercises is in front of the TV.
4) Whether I’m home or on the road, I try to have at least an hour of true practice a day, in addition to any time spent writing, performing, etc.
5) WHAT to practice is just as important as how and when to practice! Since I’ve run on so long here, I’m going to dedicate another post to what I’m working on at the moment.
If you enjoyed this post you might like these:
- Practice makes perfect week
- Guitars at the Grammys: who played guitar for Carrie Underwood and other mysteries solved
- Guitar for the Absolute Beginner: How to play guitar in 30 days
- “Ask Phil Keaggy”
- Guitar for the absolute beginner: jerks in music stores and why I suck at golf
