What’s up guys?! So I’ve been meaning to carve away some time for a couple of months now to sit down properly and write this blog. I’m at a point of my career now where I’m starting to become satisfied with my playing….I stress starting to because I don’t think I’ll ever be 100% satisfied and I actually hope I don’t become that way.
I’ve also been racking up my XP as a teacher and have clocked up some ridiculous hours helping other people on the guitar the last 6 years working 6 days a week on this thing. Its helped given me so much insight into the differences between players who are successful with their goals and those that aren’t, which unfortunately is the majority on the guitar.
So, one common misconception I see is that people think its just a matter of putting in the TIME. They think that this is the be all and end all of becoming great BUT its actually the baseline. We’ve all heard stories of Steve Via (who I think was actually BSing btw) that he practiced 14 hours a day. There’s a number of reasons why I think this either wasn’t true or was taken out of context and spun as a bit of a lie by the major guitar magazines back in the day….I mean it sounds cool too right….that you can just sit down for 14 hours a day playing your guitar over a Summer and emerge as a Guitar God from your bedroom with world tours, platinum records and whatever else coming out of your butt!
So the biggest thing I see that is missing for most guitar players, isn’t so much a lack of time….we all lack time….even me at a stage of my career where I make a living as a professional from the guitar, I wish I had more time. But the secret is what you do with the time. And yes if you really work on your “practice efficiency” and start practicing how you actually practice, you can be great with under 2 hours a day of practice.
But here are the problems
Most people put in the time but in that time, they are not actually practicing. They are noodling. They aren’t hitting the zone. Imagine going into a gym and just seeing guys walking around, maybe lifting a weight when they feel like it, but other wise just moving around without any real intensity and not really working it? So this is the first identifier, how intense is your practice?? Does it require full focus, do you come out of it actually tired, exhausted and feeling like you worked out. Or did you just do the same old noodling on comfort licks that you did the last 100 practice sessions??
Most people become content whores with their practice routine now. I’ve seen it with students. Always looking for a dopamine hit of something “new”. Classic shiny object syndrome with a new exercise, a new course from some YouTuber who promised you if you bought from him you’d be the next Yngwie. Its like an addiction and if its the sole focus of your practice routine, your F#$ed
So what’s the answer. The answer is building a practice SYSTEM. For some reason, when I was younger I went to University/College and studied Mechanical Engineering. I don’t actually recommend it or just following the institutional education system in general given it had nothing to do with my success as a musician BUT what it did teach me was how to think like an engineer and engineers build SYSTEMS.
So my focus over the last 10,000+ lessons with my students has been designing and implementing a bulletproof practice system. Now here’s the trick, once you have built your system and figured out HOW to practice properly, you can pop whatever you want through it……Metallica, Children of Bodom, Polyphia, Periphery….hell I’m churning my way through multiple Necrophagist solos now. Keep in mind you still have to work on your technique, but the PRACTICE SYSTEM IS WHAT 99% of Guitarists are missing.
So what does it look like:
Step 1 - MEMORY - Learn a piece (solo, song, exercise etc) and spend a few days MAX getting it under your fingers and memorising it. Work hard to just introduce your hands to it.
Step 2 - PRESSURE - This is the part most people are scarred of and funnily enough where the MAX benefit is when learning guitar. You have to apply pressure to your hands once you learn a piece to activate Muscle Memory in your hands and the Subconscious part of your brain to take over and start embedding it at a super deep level. So yes, you need to play with backing tracks or a metronome and embed it with the accountability and pressure that ONLY a backing track or metronome provides. The crazy thing is that most people never even get to this stage.
Step 3 - ALTITUDE - In step 2, you have to find a working tempo where you can play the piece without mistakes but it should require your full focus and a bit of intensity. In this step, we start to put the speeds up and find where your limit is, hence I call it ALTITUDE. We need to slowly acclimate at different faster tempos and when you can play the piece you are working on 3-5 times without a mistake. You then raise the pressure just a tiny bit by 5-10% speed and work on activating your hands at that new challenging tempo.
Step 4 - PERFORMANCE - Now you’ve got the hands working and the piece at a quicker tempo if not full speed, you have to then allow the hands to become relaxed and perform the piece almost on their own. Lots of repetition here and your brain and focus should be freed up now to work on the small nuances and details like vibrato, transitions in and out of licks and attitude.
I have a tool that I recommend all students once they are at an appropriate level which is Guitar Pro. I use it to write music and to practice and I follow the above PRACTICE SYSTEM using it every day. And when my students start using it, and start using it to slow down the songs/solos/exercises they are working on and follow the steps above, they usually have a QUANTUM LEAP in their playing. Its pretty rewarding to watch and see.
If you want to pick up a copy of Guitar Pro check it out here - https://www.guitar-pro.com/#ae915
I am an affiliate for Guitar Pro so pls use the link above and I’ll score all of a healthy $5 or so for it! Go Team!
I hope this helps and I hope you follow the above and get some guitar gains happening!
Cam Bird
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