{"id":6545,"date":"2015-03-15T23:43:51","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T06:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=6545"},"modified":"2019-03-10T20:06:15","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T03:06:15","slug":"3-steps-to-better-guitar-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/3-steps-to-better-guitar-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Steps To Better Guitar Practice…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was reading an interesting article<\/a> about a study that was done on practicing habits at the University of Texas.<\/p>\n

You can read the article in its entirety if you want, but the goal of the study was to determine which, if any, practicing habits did the top performers exhibit?<\/p>\n

In other words, if you put 17 very high level musicians in a position where they have to learn something and play it well the next day, what things to the best players have in common at the end?<\/p>\n

Now some of the ideas don’t always apply to us as blues players… but many of them do and with a little tweaking fall right in line with a lot of things I always say about practicing:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Don’t play it wrong<\/strong>… notice that the last 3 items on the list are basically: find errors quickly and correct them, slow down when you have to so as to not make mistakes, play the hard parts over and over until you don’t make the mistake anymore. Every time you play something wrong it gives your brain an option. And you don’t want your brain and fingers any option except correct. If you make a mistake, stop, find it, fix it, and continue. Do NOT start over and ignore it.<\/li>\n
  2. Don’t use a metronome at first<\/strong>… using a metronome will keep your time steady, and that’s not what you want when you’re still learning a section. You need to know exactly what beats the notes fall on (count out loud) and you need to be able to slow down for difficult parts (so you don’t make the mistake in the first place.)<\/li>\n
  3. Don’t separate notes and time<\/strong>… notice that item number 1 on the list is “playing hands-together” early on in practice. Now, we’re guitar players so that doesn’t make as much sense but what it alludes to is putting all of the music together at the beginning so that you’re building the whole instead of just assembling some parts. Many students say they are going to learn the notes first and the count later – that never<\/em> works (nor does the reverse.) Start counting out loud with the first note you strike.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now I’m no professor or anything… all of my suggestions come from my own (albeit extensive) experience teaching people just like you.<\/p>\n

    And while I don’t need anyone to tell me what is going to work and what won’t, it’s always nice to see an “official” endorsement of the things I see in the lesson room from day to day and year to year.<\/p>\n

    It’s particularly difficult for you if you’re an intermediate or advanced guitar player who never really got the hang of a couple of basic things and now you feel like you have to go back and re-learn those things… but in every instance where I’ve had a student who did that, it did not take that long and the improvements in their future learning were off the charts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I was reading an interesting article about a study that was done on practicing habits at the University of Texas. You can read the article in its entirety if you want, but the goal of the study was to determine which, if any, practicing habits did the top performers exhibit? In other words, if you […]<\/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\/6545"}],"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=6545"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7585,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6545\/revisions\/7585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}