I’ve often wondered about what your mind can do to improve your playing even when you don’t have a guitar in your hands. As a teenager I remember vividly using the 30-45 minute bus ride to and from school to think about what scales I could use to improvise over a song… or to think about the chords in a song I knew and try to analyze the progression mentally.<\/p>\n
In fact, I would even go so far as to come up with progressions in my head, and then try them out when I got home to see if they sounded the way I expected.<\/p>\n
There are other little things too… and I never gave them much thought until I received an email from a student who outlined his own “no-guitar-in-hand” practice routine. And it was almost exactly the same as mine.<\/p>\n
So I figured, “okay, must not just be me then.” And I think it’s worth sharing here because I think you can get a lot of benefits and make progress on an airplane, driving in a car, sitting through a boring lecture… almost anywhere.<\/p>\n
So I’m going to turn it over to James now…<\/p>\n
These exercises have helped me….<\/p>\n
#1 I used to warm up my left hand by squeezing a tennis ball, the best results come by using my finger tips besides squeezing the ball I slowly release the squeezed ball since I must be able to release the string (pull offs) as well as hammerons.<\/p>\n
I spell, scales, chords, ect. forward ,reverse, inversions (slowly in my head).<\/p>\n
Here’s one that helps my left hand, buy tapping my fingers of the left hand slowly both forward and reverse on to a stable object like a table top, first thinking or speaking the note then tapping. This method is very useful in developing the left side of the brain.<\/p>\n
Have you ever tapped out a series of beats with your right hand, then tried to repeat those same patterns with your left? I have all ways found my left hand to be slower and sloppy. This exercise may well be the best one for me… of course if left handed… just reverse the exercise.<\/p>\n
In addition to\u00a0 tapping out a beat… I think the name of the note to be played and vision it’s place on the guitar neck. This may be the best exercise I’ve discovered.<\/p>\n
For myself, simply knowing I’m not alone was quite a revelation. But what’s important here is that, when you stop and think about it, you probably have a lot of down time in your day when you’re not doing anything.<\/p>\n
Take that time and think about your scales, your chords, beats, rhythms… any of the elements of music that you can enhance without your guitar in your hands.<\/p>\n
And if you have any other little exercises like the ones above from James, please share them in the comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve often wondered about what your mind can do to improve your playing even when you don’t have a guitar in your hands. As a teenager I remember vividly using the 30-45 minute bus ride to and from school to think about what scales I could use to improvise over a song… or to think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5727,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/5727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}