In this post I’d like to reflect on the past week in terms of the practice and learning that I did and to make note of some changes to make going forward. As with all posts on this site the mileage that anyone else might get out of this may vary.
First observation, when I sat down to do a half hour of learning (War Pigs for the proposed next jam session) I ended up spending an hour and a half at it. This happened because I was so into learning the tune that I really didn’t want to stop and wanted to fit in as much as I could. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing as sometimes you have to roll with the punches but it meant that my planned practice session for the night didn’t happen.
Therefore I do feel I need to force myself to limit my learning sessions to no more than an hour at most. If I was going to actual lessons I wouldn’t be able to go past this limit so I need to be strict with myself. I also think I may have been worried about forgetting what I had learnt by the next night but even if that happened that’s completely ok. I can just revise it and practice what was learnt. Essentially whatever is learnt one night becomes part of the practice session for the next night.
I think the key thing here will be to work out how long I want to spend on learning (no more than an hour) and then to work out what realistically I can learn in that session. So in the case of War Pigs I could have limited myself to a half hour and just learnt the opening minute, or I could have done an hour just and learnt the opening minute plus the verse riffs.
Next up, five minutes is maybe too short for certain things. In my last blog post I mentioned that 5 minutes is long enough to practice on guitar parts but I found this to be much too short and for ten minutes to be a better sweet spot. I now feel it’s important to not cram too much into a single practice session and maybe a “less is more” approach would be better. I think ten minute slots are a good compromise here. Maybe the five minute slots are better for doing exercises such as running scales or alternate picking but for song parts a bit more time seems to yield better results for me.
The key takeaway here is to not limit the period of time to just five minutes and to allow ten minutes or more for more complicated things in the routine for any given session
And finally, warning up. In the past I have done warm up exercises to kind of get the blood flowing in the fingers for focused guitar practice. I haven’t done these in a while and didn’t bother with them much last week. I do actually feel it is important to warm up properly.
For me a focused guitar practice session should be structured similarly to the likes of physical exercise class. If we take the example of Muay Thai which I did up until recently, that would start with a warm up to get the blood flowing (skipping, burpees, running), then some drills to start to get people in the zone (100 kicks on pads), then you would have the focused part of the session which would be a mixture of learning and practicing, and at the end you’d practice what was learnt in a more free flowing way or might have done some light sparring.
So to apply something similar to guitar it would be something like:
- Warm up: 10 – 15 mins
- Post warm up (maybe an easy tune from a set list): 5 mins max
- Learning session (1 hr max)
- Practice session (1 hr max)
- Jams (whatever time is left to you)
Admittedly there’s a lot in their for one night but the learning and practice sessions can be chopped and changed to just have one or the other. I know for a fact there are nights where I have played guitar for at least a couple of hours so I can definitely do this. You can just change it to suit. If all you had in a given night was a half hour then you might just do a quick 5 minute warm up, twenty minutes of learning or practice, and then finish with a quick jam over a blues backing track.
And that’s it. I’ll be using this knowlegde going forward to hopefully have better, more effective practice and learning sessions going forward.
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