Music Discipline - Practice Routine Generator

Music Discipline - Practice Routine Generator



This might help

Structure Your Daily Guitar Practice

Structure Your Daily Guitar Practice Schedule for Maximum Achievement! How-To. |


I linked to this about 18 months ago and am revisiting...

Pretty good overall ideas.  I am scattered right now and need to focus my time better.  I would like to

• continue to develop technique
• scales
• rhythm
• finger dexterity / chord changes / riffs & licks
• build up my repertoire
• things I can just play
• songs to play with Cynthia
• master a couple of new things
• at least two decent fingerpicking songs
• chord melody to Can't Help Falling in Love with You
• and along the way, build up some fingerstyle holiday tunes because I like them

I have a fair amount of time to play & practice but quite often just pick up the guitar and play a song or two that I know fairly well, with no structure to the practice session.

Here are some suggestions from the link:

1. Scales – Always start up with an exercise that involves going over scales since this is a great warm up for the fingers and for the brain too – as long as you consciously focus on WHAT notes you are playing and not just blindly going over the “scale boxes”. This video shows some great drills to begin with. You can do that to a backing track, a song, or a recording on a loop pedal in order to make things more interesting. BTW – loop pedals can help you immensely in your guitar practice – read here more about them.
2. Finger Dexterity – Drills like “the spider“ will do wonders to your ability to send your fingers all over the fretboard and hit exactly the note that you were aiming for, and also with fingering complex chords. Here you can find another good set of dexterity exercises that are more challenging. Steve Stine has a great set of exercises.
3. Chords – Chords are our bread and butter so this one's very important and very effective as well. For these 5 minutes, I practice changing chords and adding new chords to my arsenal. The chords that I add here are usually more challenging chords like dim7's or CAGED shapes but sometimes I need to work back on some pretty basic ones as well. Here I demonstrate myself on the 2 techniques I use to implement new chords to my arsenal. Remember to do these exercises also very slow and not just very fast, so the chords will really get imprinted in your fingers.
4. Picking Speed – Here I work for 5 minutes on each kind of picking that I use, and practice building up speed and accuracy. I usually practice fingerstyle for 5 minutes and picking with a pick for 5 minutes. On those 5 minutes what I do can vary a lot. With the fingerstyle I have been working on perfecting “Don't Think Twice It's Alright” in the last 2 months, slowly building up speed with the metronome, (so I also work on my time keeping) and also doing some short exercises as well. With the pic, I work on a song with a metronome, and do other drills for picking up my speed such as this one. Make sure to write down on a smartphone note the speed that you are now comfortable with on the metronome / drum machine app (Beats Plus is a good one) after finishing an exercise. If you won't, it will be hard to keep track of where you are and you will waste time without progressing.
5. Ear Training – figuring out a melody – Here I usually play a song on the speakers and try to play along to the melody only. Occasionally turn the song off and try it “a-capella” to hear myself better. This works on interval recognition abilities which is very helpful with improvising skills and being able to HEAR the note that you are about to play and know what you want to play instead of just “shooting all over the scale” when improvising.
6. Improvising Lead Guitar – Here I choose a song that I like or a backing track and jam on to that song. “4 chords” songs are great to begin with here since almost everything tend to sound good with them as long as you are on the scale, preferably the pentatonic scale. This is also an extremely fun part of my practice. Here you can see some tips regarding lead guitar do's and dont's.
7. Repertoire Building – Here I focus one song from my repertoire list and work on improving it, usually out of my DIY chord books and usually with a metronome. (find out about the best metronome and best guitar apps here) to work on time keeping as well. This is the part I enjoy the most and also it is not effective if done for only 5 minutes like the rest of the drills so I save it for the end of my session as a “prize” and usually work on a song for 10-20 minutes at least. Check out my repertoire article for more details about how to work on it effectively. 
8. Triads everywhere -  I own a couple of the "Learn & Master" courses from Gibson, now by Steve Krenz of Guitar Gathering.  They sent me a freebie; a set of  lessons on major, minor, seventh triads (where of course for sevenths you need to leave out either the root or the fifth else it's a quadad or whatever four things are called...), locating them on the top 3 strings or on 2-4.  I find these really useful playing with the band.  I can mix up chord locations and voicings and arpeggiate them or otherwise muck about with the rhythm and get a lot of parts to sound pretty fresh, rather than just open G-C-D over and over.  You can find these yourself from CAGED ideas - take the top 3 notes from each shape.

* Incorporate the use of a metronome or drum machine apps and work on time keeping as much as you can. Time keeping is extremly important if you want to sound good and also it is not very hard to improve once you start working on it. Here you can read about 10 tips on how to practice your time keeping.* Five daily minutes should be enough for most subjects. Remember the 80\20 rule: “80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts”. 5 daily minutes will get you very far with very little time invested. If you want to put in even more time – great, but the “curve” might not be worth your time.

Tap your foot along with everything you can play. You don`t want to tap it with every strum, just tap your foot on the beat. This is the most underrated tip ever.

I have a bunch of books & lessons scattered around.  

• Desi Serna's picking mechanics course
• Gibson Learn & Master, both basic course and finger style, and their major scales DVDs
• A bunch of Hal Leonard books
• The Chet Atkins method book
• Leavitt's Modern Method book from Berklee School of Music
• Complete technique: fretboard accuracy (Joseph Alexander)
• Dan Thorpe's Fingerstyle Fun and companion books.
• Guitar Aerobics
• JazzGuitarLessons.net intro to chord melody
• Out on Dropbox/Music
• Guitar Primer
• Guitarra: Songwriting
• Thorpe: 
• Beginners guide, 
• Lightning fast chord changes
• Fingerstyle 101
• Many other pdfs etc
• I also have quite a few kindle & pdfs on my iPad

What I want to do is figure out the basic structure of practicing so I can easily just pick up the guitar for 5-10 minutes and do something that is either fun or useful or both.

Next post will get into this a bit more deeply & maybe linkify a lot of my books so I don't just lose them.