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.

Online guitar resources

https://techboomers.com/best-apps-to-learn-to-play-guitar

With links to other useful sources 

I should revise my guide to learning the guitar...

Guitar songs

I've been practicing a lot of miscellanous technique for the past year or two.

My motto remains "I still suck, but I suck less than last year."



It's time for me to go back to building up a repertoire of complete songs.



I've got a few dozen down pretty well.

Current set of stuff includes:

• Jazzy
• Popsicle Toes
• Eggplant
• Lady wants to know (ok, I like Michael Franks...)
• Quien Sera (aka Sway)
• Let's Fall in Love
• Fly me to the moon (close to playing this well in chord melody!)
• Beatles
• And I love her
• Birthday
• Day Tripper
• With a little help from my friends
• All my Loving
• When I'm Sixty Four
• Let it be
• [partial] While my guitar gently weeps (challenging descending minor but I'm getting there)
• Grateful Dead
• Friend of the Devil
• Uncle John's Band
• Ripple
• Folk/Country/Jimmy Buffett/John Denver
• Don't think twice
• Teach your children
• House of the rising sun
• For what it's worth
• Wagon wheel
• Country roads
• On the road again
• Leaving on a Jet plane
• Hallelujah
• Annie's song (need to look at the music - fast chord changes!)
• Come Monday
• Margaritaville
• Cheeseburger in Paradise

• Pop/Rock
• All I have to do is dream
• Spooky
• Good Riddance
• Closing Time
• I'm into something good
• I shot the sheriff
• Kokomo
• Baby I love your way
• Centerfield (best on electric)
• Brown eyed girl
• Moondance
• I'll have to say I love you in a song
• Longer (Dan Fogelberg) (chord melody!)
• Hey Soul Sister (better on ukelele)
• Shallow
• Vincent
• After midnight
• Surf tunes, on the stratocaster, extra reverb and gain ...
• Walk Don't Run
• Pipeline
• Mr Moto
• Sleepwalk
• Misirlou (w/o the Dick Dale high frequency picking...)
• Partial: Telstar, Wipeout, Penetration, Surfer Girl, Surfin' USA.  Need more Hank Marvin.

Holy moly that's a lot of songs.  The list is not complete either - I've got some other things that haven't made it into my binder yet.  Nice'n'Easy, Sweet Georgia Brown, Isn't she lovely...

Maybe soon I'll go through and make sure I have them mastered.  Time to record myself as well.  Perhaps I need some voice lessons so I can sing them - I sing even worse than I play guitar but might be able to get close enough that people don't cover their ears and run screaming from the room.

But this all started with me looking at some things to learn.  Especially if my wife can sing them.

  I'm working on chord melody with my teacher but most of it is still just getting basics in place.  I.e. if I need a particular melody sequence on top of a Gm chord, say, what should I choose for fingerings & chords?  This involves learning a lot of chord shapes and all of the places on the fretboard I can find them (think CAGED positions).

Here's some holiday things in fingerstyle / chord melody.

10 Cool Christmas Chord Melody Arrangements - GUITARHABITS

Also links to some other holiday songs for guitar, both easy chord strumming and fingerstyle.

Guitar Nick's guide to Xmas songs



Some links to lists of guitar songs.  Have not yet extracted the ones I want.  Some of these lists contain tabs or charts or youtube lessons.



30 easy chord songs has a bunch of nice tunes, only three of them are on my list above.



100 easy guitar songs links to Ultimate Guitar chord charts and Guitar Pro tabs



Acoustic beginner songs (85!)



Eh, should do more blues.  I've been playing blues with the band.  "12 bar in A, quickchange, breaks" and I can play it.  That's for "little bit".



Some blues to learn:

• Born under a bad sign
• Rock me baby (Johnny Winter)
• Strange Brew
• Mustang Sally
• Maybellene
• Hoochie coochie man
• Good golly miss molly
• Johnny B Goode
• Pride and Joy
• Hound Dog
• Crossroads
• The thrill is gone
• I got you (I feel good)  ("play whatever fancy stuff you like, just gimme the ONE" JB to bootsy)
• Rock around the clock

Here's a few more that I've got tabs/chord charts for

• Can't help falling in love (there's a nice simple chord melody lesson)
• Just the way you are (Bruno Mars)
• I'm yours (Mraz)
• Every breath you take
• Blackbird
• Eleanor Rigby
• Paperback Writer
• Ain't no sunshine
• Stand by me
• Mockingbird
• Born in the USA
• sweet dreams
• Down under
• Woman (John Lennon)
• True Colors and Time after Time
• Landslide
• Free Falling
• Stop loving you
• Crazy little thing called love
• Break on Through
• Songbird (I never really got into Oasis but like their stuff when I hear it)
• Feelin' Alright
• Cat's in the cradle
• Black water
• Layla (unplugged) - not actually terribly hard.
• Breezin' - some soloing is tough but the chords are easy.  Good duo with a killer lead guy.

Some of these are linked/tabbed in Revo's list of 50 easy guitar songs

Daily Guitar Practice

So, I'm getting a lot better.  But still fairly undisciplined in practice routines.  This site has some good stuff and I'm looking at this page to guide me in structuring practice sessions.

5 minutes twice a day is a lot

2 hours once a week isn't enough


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


how to structure your daily practice time for maximum achievement and improvement in the shortest time possible.

Use those keys in building your daily guitar practice schedule plan and you are sure to be taking full advantage of every minute that you choose to dedicate here.

Lead Guitar exercises

Scales, arpeggios...

Deft Digits youtube lesson on scales

The spider exercise

Hotfrets - In-Depth Guitar Learning Systems

Pick a style (3 choices: Jazz, Rock, Country)
Pick a key (any of the 12!)
Pick from 21 progressions

and it will play the progression so you can hear it.

Hotfrets - In-Depth Guitar Learning Systems:

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The Top 50 Ukulele Sites - StringVibe

I have a ukulele and I'm not afraid to use it...

The Top 50 Ukulele Sites - StringVibe:

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Chord Progression Map

Chord Progression Map



Nice little tool that maps the "harmonically friendly" chord transitions.

Click on any of the 12 possible keys and voila, filled in with the right chords.



I am writing my first real song, 4/4 time.  New challenges...  find progressions that work both

• musically, to convey the mood, and
• instrumentally, in that they are all chords I can play
• optionally also have some nice bass runs every other bar of the verses...

Probably start with G but might like to go straight to Bm (iii) rather than the typical C or D...

let me play some more and see how it all comes out!

Free Guitar Backing Tracks

Huey Lewis And The News - I Want A New Drug and many more

can be downloaded as mp3 and run through, e.g., amazing slow downer or audacity or whatever



there are some other sites:



Nail guitar has some tabs and a subset have backing tracks.  I haven't checked out many but they seem fine.  I need to get some Oasis tunes into the playlist :-)



Go Play Along has a full featured free version that restricts you to a library of 3 songs, $20 for the real thing.



Riffstation

I have not done anything with this, looks like there are a handful of interesting tools but I can only say that it exists, no review yet...



I do use Rocksmith  frequently.  The user supported tracks are way cool although quality varies...

Beginner Guitar Lessons - TheGuitarLesson.com

Here is another site.  He has a pretty significant set of free lessons, and a subscription plan for the premium content that runs $9/monthly, less with longer signups.  I like his first lesson on fingerpicking so this might be a good choice too



Beginner Guitar Lessons - TheGuitarLesson.com:

And just stumbled across this one
Andy guitar

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Learning guitar without a face-to-face teacher

So, as posted years ago, I have been thinking about guitar.

Actually, in the past 5 years,  I've been learning guitar and playing.  I play occasionally with some friends, mostly just noodling on my own.  I've got serious in the past maybe two years.

I still suck but every month I suck less.

When I started, I could only make noise.  But pretty soon I was making noise that had some musical quality.   And pretty soon after that my wife would ask "isn't that Twist and Shout"?  And sometimes the song she mentioned was the song I was trying to play!

I have not had lessons, except for a handful of group classes at Gryphon Strings in Palo Alto, from Carol McComb.  Carol is great.  I have met many casual folkies who have taken classes with Carol.

I've mostly done stuff on my own through a combination of

• gamified things (RockSmith, Yousician), 
• structured video lessons (Gibson's Learn and Master) and 
• some online things (Justin Guitar, Guitar Jamz)

Let me give some thoughts and opinions on what I've seen and make some light recommendations.  I'm not an expert but have had some experience, perhaps it can be of help.

First, whatever else you are doing, remember this (I'll repeat again I'm sure)
Try to do it perfectly even if slowly.  Make good sounds happen.  Your fingers will learn how to make things sound right if that's what you are practicing.  They will learn to make buzzes and mutes and other crappy sounds if THAT is what you are practicing.  Make it sound right, THEN speed up.  If you are pushing tempo and playing garbage, you will learn to play garbage and it's hard to unlearn.

Music is made from building blocks.  There are "chunks" that if you master, will help pick up new tunes.  These are not simply notes and chords.  Sequences are important.  You will find the same kind of sequences over and over.  Once you get to moveable chords, especially the basic barre forms, and can play arpeggios on everything, you are a guitar god!  Or at least minor deity.
So we find out that there is a reason certain things get taught and you should learn them.  This suggests using one of the structured lesson programs, like Justin guitar, even if you like Rocksmith, or just learning individual songs.  It's a good thing to learn some songs!  I'd recommend learning the E, D and A chords, with which you can play a lot of things.  They are not terribly hard, although I still have some problems getting the A to ring out perfectly when switching.  Just can't squeeze all my stubby fingers into exactly the right place every time...

Rocksmith
So, the second approach I took was buying Rocksmith 2014 for myself for Xmas, 2013.  Great great choice.  It gets great reviews.  Rocksmith is gamified instruction.  Looks like Guitar Hero, but you plug in a real instrument (either electric or an acoustic with a pickup; I have each.  I find the program doesn't pick up the acoustic as well and quite often I get frustrated because I know I'm playing right yet the program is scoring it as a miss.  So I use the strat).  There are a lot of parts to the program.  "Learn a Song" takes you through a song.  The structure is that there are levels of difficulty, very fine grained.  As you play, the program scores you and will nudge up the difficulty when you are playing well (or make it easier if you are not).   Play through, get a score, crowd cheers or whatever.  One of the finer aspects, though, is that inside the song you can interrupt to get to the "riff repeater" practice mode.  This is mostly what I do.  You can set some parameters and work on a subset of the song at slower tempo.

The other really really cool bit in Rocksmith is the user community.  There is a lot of content available from Ubisoft for a price & I've bought a lot of it.  However, the file formats are known and you can hack your own song.  CustomsForge has thousands of user contributed songs, some of which are garbage but many of which are great.  I like surf tunes, and bought the Surf Pack, but that only has Misirlou, Walk Don't Run and Wipeout.  Quite a few others exist on customs forge like at least two Pipelines.  Sleepwalk by Santo & Johnny, AND by Hank Marvin and the Shadows.

Learn and Master Guitar

This set is not cheap.  Lists for $249.  It's occasionally available on sale but I think I paid $149 for it.
There are some additional lessons available for e.g. genre specific things which I haven't purchased.

It contains perhaps 50 hours worth of instruction & practice tracks.  More like 20 hours of instruction with a lot of exercises, play-alongs and "workshops".
The structure of the course is excellent, and the instruction is pretty clear.  There are some books to go along with the DVDs.
I do think that some modules are too long and that a student benefits from working on smaller chunks more frequently.  However, this set is a go-to for working on specific things now.  The barre chord modules and exercises are really good.  I finally can do that stupid F# that's in a couple of songs I've been trying to play.  And after seeing the Beach Boys, I needed to learn Kokomo.  It's got some less common chords and mildly challenging rhythm but turned out to be easy since Steve Krenz showed me the barre shapes for minor7.

CAGED

You may run across some guys who want to teach you the "CAGED" system.  It's fine, it's not magic.  There are a lot of nice tunes that don't use anything except open chords, so why not?
Well, some folks think it's counterproductive

Justin Guitar

This site is quite good.  Justin has a boatload of YouTubes and on his site has them organized into lessons.  The practice routines are very valuable.  It's pretty much all free - he does upsell some books & DVDs etc but it's all gentle.  This is the best first instructional site because the lessons are good and it is free.  You can work with it and decide how your learning should progress, without spending money on other stuff.

Practicing well
But learning anything takes practice, and learning to get better and do something well takes disciplined and "deliberate practice".  That means (a) you need to do it and (b) you need a method to immediately provide corrections and guidance.

See, e.g.
http://j2jenkins.com/2012/02/10/how-i-practice-deliberately-on-guitar/
http://j2jenkins.com/2013/03/25/my-daily-guitar-practice-routine/
http://j2jenkins.com/2013/07/01/300-hours-of-deliberate-practice-on-guitar/
http://cochranemusic.com/guitar-deliberate-practice

What to practice

InfoBarrel Guide to learning guitar

List of exercises - Music Discipline:
Free site with play along exercises, metronome control.  If you register, you get a better set of exercises.  Interesting concept, you enter the number of minutes you have to practice and the site feeds you a set of exercises to make up that time.  I go here for 10 minutes two or three times a day.

FingerTrainer
I have only seen the ad for it...

If you join Guitar Tricks, they have a lot of suggested practice routines

Yousician
A fairly new app, which detects what you are playing and provides immediate feedback.  There is a free version which limits what you can do (but you can do a lot!) and a subscription version with more behind it.  I've got it, played it a little bit.  I hook up my strat to the ipad with the Apogee JamPlay device.  It detects my playing pretty well, tells me if I'm early or late.  Different view than the RockSmith / Guitar hero view of notes coming towards you.  But not that different - they are just moving right to left with a bouncing ball marking the tempo.

I have basic chords and most open chords under control.  I sort of understand barre chords and the shapes for major, minor, seventh and something else I forget the name of.

I do not understand strum patterns nor travis picking but have been exposed to them.  Right now, just getting the chords pretty much in the right order at the right tempo is all I can hope for.  But using the thumb for bass notes and strumming with e.g. alternate bass is next on the list.

Other stuff
There are a ton of guitar lessons online, most on YouTube though there are many sites that control the content.  The quality really varies.  Anyone with a webcam can make up a lesson and post it.  I have not gone through the entire set of intertubes but have seen a lot, and wasted a lot of time.  In no real order, here are some you might want to check out.

Free guitar lessons  A lot of free lessons.  They want to upsell you eventually to their DVD and online course "The Guitar system"

GuitarLessons365  I found this site when I decided I wanted to learn John Fogerty's Centerfield.  They have a nice YouTube.  I still can't do the bended chords but otherwise I can play it through just fine. Classic opening riff followed by pretty simple chord sequences.  It's one of my go-to songs if we are sitting around and somebody says, "hey Dave, how's your guitar coming along?  play us something".  Most of the time, one song is enough for everyone to agree they have had enough, but if I start with this one, I get a second chance.  I also found a nice Margaritaville.  It can be played as a very easy song, or you can get fancy and do all the stuff Jimmy Buffett does in between the second and third verses.
There is a lot of free stuff here, and like everyone else, they would like to upsell you to premium content.

Martyzsongs May or may not be your style of instruction.  He takes thing pretty slow and I think in general is quite clear.  Some of his YouTubes are wordier than necessary but overall you can probably get some good lessons and practice.

Guitar Habits  Not really that much about habits, and when he is, it's wordy and not really on point.
Guitar blogger, who posts some lessons.  Many posts are low content, quite a few just motivational platitudes, but some are pretty interesting and I go here now and then to scan the lessons.

Andrew Wasson
He's got some great lessons.  Some free stuff, can pay for the good stuff.  He has a lot of great info on theory, which helped me figure out the point of some progressions, as well as helping understand how to move a song to a different key.

FretJam is not really for beginners, but at the intermediate level, he shows a lot about learning various scales.  You can learn a lot about music theory here as well.

Subscription teaching sites

For more professional instruction than just the random guy with a webcam, you might want to look at

Artist Works
I'm tempted.  They have a subscription model with various pricing based on length of commitment.  $35/month monthly, $20/month annual subscription.  Awesome musicians.  Howard Levy for harmonica, Tony Trischka for banjo, Mike Marshall for mandolin...
For guitar, there are several teachers, covering fingerstyle, bluegrass flatpicking, classical, rock (Paul Gilbert!!).  I looked through Martin Gilbert's free lesson on fingerstyle jazz.  I love that sound and might sign up.  But, it's $$$ committed.  Much cheaper than just regular lessons from your neighborhood teacher, though.

Jam Play and Guitar Tricks are similar with subscriptions available at various pricing.  Cheaper than Artist works.  They have a handful of free "teaser" lessons to show off what you see.  Mostly you see variations on some teacher demonstrating stuff.

Coursera has a beginning guitar class from Berklee School of Music.

Tabs etc

Ultimate Guitar and the app Songsterr

Guitar Pro will play the tab, you can adjust speed etc.  Great practice tool.  The higher end My Songbook tabs are too pricey in my opinion, but there are a lot of free tabs, and it appears that there is a big user community, and it's not hard to make guitar pro files that you can upload and use in the system.  Pretty good tool to go along with your other stuff to work on specific songs.

OnSong is a great app to hold a bunch of songs, can make playlists, can easily change keys, and it will scroll through the song at your speed.  This seems to be hugely popular in the "worship" guitar community, but us atheist jammers can use it too.

Amazing Slow Downer
slows down the tempo without screwing up pitch!  Put in your own mp3 or whatever and play along at the speed that works for you to be able to get it right.  It's a pretty old program but does what it does well.

RiffMaster Pro
Like the above, get it on your iOS device and play along with your own music, slowing down to the tempo that suits you.

Songbooks, singing groups

My friend Pablo has been hosting approximately monthly for years - it's a great gathering and there are many more around the country.  In Carmel, there is a ukulele group and a "sing for supper" group.
In the 60's we might have called it a hootenanny.

There are three huge compilations of songs with idiosyncratic music.  Pete Seeger pretty much launched it with a view towards encouraging just getting together to sing stuff.

Enthusiasm counts for more than skill.

We use these three books, totalling maybe 2500 songs (!!!)

Rise Up Singing and the new Rise Again

Gunther Anderson

most important lessons I've learned

In case you skipped this above, slow and correct is right.  ALWAYS work on getting the sound perfect before trying for speed.  That is the core complaint I have with basic Rocksmith "learn a song".  It feeds simplified versions of songs at full speed.  However, where rocksmith really shines in this area is the use of the "riff repeater", where you can run through a portion (or all) of a song at the speed and difficulty of your choosing.  With normal settings, RR will take you through the riff and score you.  With a low enough error rate, it will speed up.  I like to set it to a very low tolerance so it won't pass me if I am playing crap.  Typically I find that day 1, I struggle with the piece and continue to make mistakes for perhaps 4-5 playthroughs.  Then, seemingly from nowhere, I "get it" and run through it perfectly.  It will speed me up and generally I can go straight to about 90% before making mistakes.  Going from 90% speed to 100% speed is really hard.   I'll put it down at this point and pick up the next day.  Now, I have mastery in maybe another 15-30 minutes.  Way cool.  If I want to master a song, I can do it in about a week, with maybe an hour a day on Rocksmith.  ("Master" to my level of satisfaction - I am still at beginner to intermediate on pretty much everything)

How would I start today?

• Justin guitar, 
• Music exercises and 
• Yousician, for maybe 6 months to a year.  All FREE.

Then I'd buy Rocksmith and start racking up some scores, playing some things for fun, working on some specific songs.
Oh, a metronome is really helpful.  Set it slow and keep the tempo.  Speed it up as you do something perfectly.  Rocksmith Riff Repeater will do it for you... but it's not a metronome.  Guitar Pro has a nice synthetic metronome, I'm sure there are others.

This should get you to a decent plateau.  To progress more, you will probably need a real teacher, or one of the subscription lesson sites, or good discipline to put together more practice sessions beyond what MusicExercises gives you.

Buy some songbooks and learn stuff you like.

Meet up with a bunch of people and sing with the Rise Up Singing books.  Make music, have fun!




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