This is a follow up to my last post regarding learning, practicing and playing. Whereas that was a high level overview of my approach to things I thought I’d use this post as a way to break things down a bit further.
Specifically this is a walkthrough of what I plan on doing personally and will reference songs and things I am learning myself but if anyone is able to take anything away from this for themselves then even better.
For the weeks ahead I have decided to just focus on songs for my jam session band. We only get together once a month so my brain kind of works in terms of these sessions as milestones. We have done 2 sessions now and it’s looking like we are going to try and keep these going on this schedule.
I won’t be doing any music theory or blues exercises during this phase (although there will be some blues stuff for the band but I’ll elaborate on that later). The reason for this is that I really want to nail the songs we are learning and after looking at some of the videos of us playing there are loads of things that I need to fix. If not for these jam sessions my learning and practice goals might be very different but as I mentioned in my own post on goal setting, you need to set goals but be open to changing them as circumstances change.
The key thing to remember here is that with the limited time that I have available I need to pick my battles. As much as I’d love to devote hours of time to learning and practicing more blues related material I don’t have the time to do that at the moment if I want to improve my playing for the jam sessions.
That being said, working on the things that I plan on practicing will still help me improve as a guitarist so it’s all helping towards that overall goal. Fixing these things will mean they don’t need to be worked on as much going forward and will free up time to swing back into the blues material later (which is still massively important to me). Ultimately I don’t want these jam sessions to dictate how I am spending my guitar time but for the short term I certainly see no harm in it.
What To Learn
In the interests of full transparency (and at the time of writing this blog post) here are the new songs that I need to learn for the next session.
- Basket Case – Green Day
- American Idiot – Green Day
- Trigger Inside – Therapy
- War Pigs – Black Sabbath
For the next session we also plan on doing Smells Like Teen Spirit but I actually learnt that recently and so just need to work on practicing it.
War Pigs is the big one in the list. It’s a long song with a lot of guitar parts and changes. I’ll need to be working on that as soon as possible, breaking it down and learning it piece by piece over the weeks ahead. The other songs are shorter, less complex songs and each could likely be learnt during a single learning session and then added to the practice routine (famous last words).
Assuming that there will be at least 4 weeks between now and the next session the approach I am going to take here is to use all learning sessions for the first 2 weeks exclusively on War Pigs and then will start to bring in the other songs.
I could probably write a blog post some day on my approach to learning songs (which at this stage still relies heavily on tabs and YouTube). Essentially I learn the rhythm parts first, then any lead licks and finally I work on any solos. Solos are the longest thing to learn and for me it makes sense to have the structure of the song learnt and in the practice routine when it comes to learning the solo. This allows me to get comfortable in the background with the song as much as possible while I work on the solo. Learning the solo first leaves less time to learn the song as a whole.
When to Learn
The next thing is to decide when to learn. Here’s a quick run down of the approach I use.
I will look at my work and family schedule for the week (Monday – Sunday) and try to fit in half hour or full hour long sessions where I can. For me these are usually at night. Occasionally this might be the odd evening or at the weekends it may be during the day depending on what is going on with the family. I think a half hour to a full hour is plenty for a learning session. Learning in smaller, bite sized chunks is more manageable than bombarding yourself with too much material.
As I said in my last post, the ratio of learning sessions to practice sessions should lean more in favour of practice sessions. Therefore I will always ensure that I schedule in more practice sessions than learning sessions. And yes I did use the term ‘schedule’ there. I put these in my calendar as appointments with myself. This is a productivity technique that I try to apply to my guitar playing. It kind of locks them in and makes them more of a commitment. I do the same thing for gym sessions.
What To Practice
Now it comes to the practice routine itself. What to practice and for how long. Here I am going to be very, very specific to my own needs but once again if any of this is beneficial to anyone else then all the better.
As I said before, the focus is going to be on fixing and addressing issues that I have experienced during jam sessions. These are things that I either felt and noticed while playing or that I saw when watching videos of the jam sessions.
Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix
When we jammed this live I absolutely fluffed the solo. I am able to play it in fine in my own practice sessions but just got nerves on the day. That being said I’d like to spend more time on this so the Purple Haze solo goes into the practice routine.
Whiskey In The Jar – Thin Lizzy
More solo trouble here. There are a couple of runs in this solo that I just struggle with. I have tried to address these by fixing them on the fly while playing the song but I think I need to focus in on the solo, slow things down a bit and work on the phrases that catch me out.
Aeroplane – RHCP
Once again the issue here is with the solo. I am about 90% there with it but there is a run at the end of the solo that throws me when trying to play along with the album track. I need to focus on listening to the solo to try and hear that run a bit better and then play along with a backing track rather than the album track.
Countdown To Extinction – Megadeth
There are 2 parts in this song that throw me. The first is the clean tone guitar part that goes straight into the twin guitar segment at the end of the song. I need to focus on nailing down that clean bit and working on making the switch into the twin guitar section (obviously we just have the one guitar bit there). The second part that throws me is the very fast run at the end of the chorus. It’s pure shred guitar! It will just take perseverance to get it. The key here will be to slow the track down to a speed where I can play it comfortably and gradually bump it up.
Screamager / Die Laughing / Nowhere – Therapy?
Overall these songs aren’t too hard to play but for some reason at the last jam I butchered what are relatively simple guitar solos and lead sections. I know that in the moment when these parts come up I kind of lose myself and sometimes realise too late what I am supposed to play. For these songs I feel dedicating some time to playing these guitar parts and the sections that lead into them will help with my muscle memory.
Neighbor – Ugly Kid Joe
When we jammed this at the last jam it fell apart after a couple of minutes as it’s actually a fairly complex song with a lot of parts. Plus our poor singer has to also play bass. For me there are two solos in the song that I need to nail down. I am not going for exact not-for-note versions of the solos but rather an approximation. I am more or less happy with what I have in place for the first solo but the second is still a bit muddled. Dedicating some practice time to this solo should help get this one nailed down good enough to jam.
Slow Blues in E (aka Malted Milk)
The first time we jammed together we did a ten minute long improv jam of Malted Milk. Ahead of the session I had learnt the Clapton version but when we jammed it we just ended up doing a slow 12 bar blues in the key of E using the lyrics. This is actually great as each time we jam this it will just be an improv jam so there’s no need to learn a specific solo and I can instead just focus on my own blues improv. Rather than practice to any version of Malted Milk I think the better option is to practice playing lead over a slow blues backing track.
Amps, pedals & Guitars
Some might say this is an odd thing to include in a practice routine and in fairness rather than being part of a practice session it’s just something I need to devote a bit of time to on its own. I normally practice at night using my laptop and amp sims but that’s not what I jam with. While not as much time is needed for this I do need to spend some time practicing with the stuff that I’ll be jamming with and dialling in my tones.
When To Practice And For How Long
As with learning sessions, practice sessions are scheduled based on the shape of the week. The approach that I like to take as mentioned before is to have more practice sessions on the calendar per week than learning sessions. Any nights where I am putting both a learning session and a practice session then the learning session comes first. Ideally I’d like to devote a full hour to a practice session. While this is not always possible I do like to practice every day even if it’s only for fifteen minutes.
For any practice session I’ll always plan out ahead of time what I’m doing for that session and I’ll spend anywhere between 5 to 15 minutes on any one thing, just filling out the time as I need to. The important thing is not to try and fit everything into every practice session. Instead using the list above as a guide I’ll make sure that across the week I’ll hit each of those things 2 or 3 times. Think of this similar to weight lifting where you try and target different muscle groups each session (and yes I appreciate that some of us also do full body sessions).
Now that being said, if I am able to fit everything into a single routine then all the better as I can hit all of those things more frequently in a week (just like that aforementioned full body weights routine)
Sample Practice Routine
Just to finish off here’s a quick 1 hour sample practice routine based on the above. You’ll notice a lot of 5 minute sections. That may not seem like a lot but when you’re working with parts of songs that are only 20 or 30 seconds long that’s plenty of time to do a few run throughs.
- Purple Haze solo – 5 minutes
- Whiskey In The Jar solo – 5 minutes
- Aeroplane Solo – 5 minutes
- Countdown to Extinction (clean guitar part) – 5 minutes
- Countdown to Extinction (chorus shred run) – 5 minutes
- Therapy tracks – 15 minutes
- Neighbor solo – 10 minutes
- Malted Milk / E Blues – 10 minutes
The above routine actually allows me to fit everything into a single one hour session. If I still had time after this I might pick a song or two from the band jam setlist to finish off with. If I feel that I need more time for things during this session then I will re-adjust things, move some things into a second day and do my aforementioned approach of hitting each item 2 or 3 times per week rather than at every session.
And that’s it, if you’ve made it this far then I congratulate you. I do admit that this post was pure indulgence on my part. I really needed an outlet to get things clear in my own head about this stuff. This marks a kind of change in tactics for me with how I am approaching my playing and with the way my brain works and processes things if I didn’t do this I’d not be getting the best from my guitar time. In my younger days I had all the time in the world to jam but as a responsible adult with wife, kids, full time job and other responsibilities I did need to be more strategic with things.
I will give this a go and will report back on how I get on with it.
Until then, keep jammin’!
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