Practice goals

To be successful with any difficult endeavor, we must have a clear understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish.

The goal of daily practice is to incrementally push our boundaries. We want to progressively improve in all aspects of our playing.

It stands to reason then, that practice will always be somewhat uncomfortable: we practice the things we still find difficult. It does little good to keep repeating things we’ve already mastered.

Practice vs. play

Practice should rarely be relaxing. If you aren’t pushing yourself in some way, you probably aren’t practicing. Practice takes focus and effort.

Sitting on the couch and mindlessly noodling while watching TV isn’t practice, it’s playing. Noodling does provide some value (your body will get some mechanical benefit from familiarity and constant contact/exercise on the instrument) but without structure its inefficient at best, and it’s definitely not practice.

We all do it, but don’t get confused: playing isn’t practicing. You must practice to improve.

Even five minutes of focus and pushing suffices for an individual practice session.

The “pushing” can be mental or it can be physical, and you should strive to balance the two.

Don’t get me wrong: Playing before or after practice (even mindless sofa noodling) is a great thing! It’s even okay to skip practice altogether some days.

The whole point of learning the instrument (for amateurs) is to have fun! The more you learn the more fun you’ll have, though.

Instead of feeling guilty when you bail on practice, reward yourself if you even pick up the guitar on any given day. The reward can be as simple as a beverage, a snack, or even allowing yourself a few minutes surfing the web or watching cat videos. Whatever feels like a small reward.

Try, however, to get in at least a few minutes of focused practice in along with your play, almost every single day.

Even five minutes a day for four our five days per week is a zillion times better than a multi-hour marathon session every few weeks.

Knowing

Pay attention: engineers in particular are particularly prone to misunderstand this goal.

Like most people, I was prone to thinking I’d mastered something and was ready to move on as soon as I merely understood it, or could perform it once at a slow, shaky tempo.

It took me several years to realize the degree to which I needed to learn things on the guitar.

I thought, for example, that once I’d memorized all five shapes of the pentatonic scale I was done. Next!

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Musicians must learn fundamentals to an almost maniacal degree. They must know things as well as they know letters of the alphabet, the names and colors of fruits, or the names and faces of friends and family members.

I call this KNOWING something (all caps and bold). Knowing is not KNOWING.

Just as when you hear “green” you immediately visualize the color, hearing the note name “C♯” should cause several locations on the fretboard to light up in your mind’s eye.

KNOWING means you know something back-to-front as well as front-to-back.

It means: given a note name, you can instantly, effortlessly find that note all over the fretboard.

It means: after plunking a finger down anywhere on the fretboard, you instantly, effortlessly know the name of the note at that location and the name of the other notes nearby.

It’s the same thing with the pentatonic scale. I thought I’d “learned the scale” as soon as I could play each “box” on the neck.

Just memorizing “the five shapes” barely scratched the surface!

• I needed to learn which note performed what function in each position.
• I needed to know where to find each note within each “box.”
• I needed to internalize how each note sounded over different chords in a blues progression.
• I needed to get to the point where I’d merely think think “G Major pentatonic” to instantly find the closest scale shape anywhere on the neck.
• Without conscious thought, I also needed to be able to instantly switch to the scale for the next chord in a progression.

KNOWING often takes months of focused practice.

The goal is not to learn something new and then move on. The goal is to completely master each new idea. To own it. To dominate it. To KNOW it.

Balance

Normal people tend to hate music theory.

We engineers aren’t normal. We enjoy learning complex things. We obsess with “why?!”

I spent years learning more and more theory without learning a single song!

I can speak at length about some fairly advanced topics in musical theory, but I’m embarrassingly less accomplished on the instrument than people that “learned everything by ear” and have only been playing for a short while!

Despite our predisposition to mono-maniacally focus on one thing, It’s best to balance our practice sessions and gradually improve in several areas.

The goal is to incrementally improve all areas of our playing.

One useful trick for balancing our practice is to categorize individual exercises into one of six categories, what I call:

The six T’s

Ideally, you’d like to balance your practice across all six categories (over the long haul, not for each practice session!).

Most exercises fall into the default “Training” category, either because they are hard to categorize, or overlap several categories fairly equally.

Other items clearly fall into just one the remaining categories:

Tunes are what it’s all about. They are exercises that synthesize all you’ve learned to play actual songs.

Theory means the fundamental concepts that help us think about and discuss music with others (concepts like harmony and the circle of fifths). Many “theory” exercises will involve rote memorization or mental reasoning.

Technique is for exercises that primarily improve your manual dexterity. Not necessarily musical exercises, but things like “spider” exercises to improve finger independence.

Timing is for drills that focus almost exclusively on your internal sense of rhythm.

Lastly, tones are exercises that focus exclusively on ear training.

Practice different parts

This section is about an anti-goal. It describes what not to do.

Let’s say for example that you’d like to learn the song Blackbird by the Beatles.

The mono-maniacal approach would be to find the tab, start at bar 1 every session for weeks on end, play from the beginning until you make a mistake, then restart from the beginning.

After several weeks, you’ll inevitably find that you’ve practiced the first few bars umpteen bazillion times but have yet to play the end of the song even once!

It’s a terrible way to practice, but sadly it’s also terribly common.

Far, far better would be to set a schedule for yourself and force yourself to stick to it. Break the song up into bite-sized sections: maybe bars 1-4 during the first session, 5-8 the next, and so on (there are 35 bars in the tab linked to above). It’s okay, even preferable, to learn the easiest bits first!

If nothing else, practicing different bars out of order helps you give equal time to every section (unlike always starting from the beginning). After getting through the whole song once, you’ll know which sections are most difficult and where to spend the bulk of your practice time.

The goal is to practice what you don’t know and what you find difficult, not to keep practicing what you already know! Sounds obvious, but our brains and bodies are sneaky and lazy: they don’t like to be pushed and will always try to go back to what they find easiest.

Even better is to break up and extend your practice sessions using the six T’s. In addition to just learning the tune, add some relevant things from the other T’s:

• For technique practice you might want to spend some time on fingerpicking in general (dexterity exercises or whatever).

• For theory you may want to figure out the chords in the harmonized G Major scale (the song’s in G) or figure out why there’s an A7 (a major chord) in bar 5 even though the diatonic chord in the key of G Major is A minor.

• For ear training, you probably want to ignore the tab altogether and attempt to transcribe the song by ear, baby-step by baby-step.

  Put on the record, pausing occasionally to see if you can figure out the key, then some of the chords, then actually reproduce some of the melodies that Paul is playing. One bar at a time.

Some days you may only work on one of the T’s, others may touch on all of them.

The point is to attack the higher level goal (“learn the song”) from multiple angles in bite-sized chunks, and not wasting time practicing what you already know. You’ll make better progress, and what you learn will be applicable to the rest of your playing.