My Methodology for Practicing the Guitar has shifted over the years. Looking back, I see how each method was affected by its context.
However, nowadays, I believe that I need to practice like the Professional Guitarists [1] out there. Namely, my technical fluency must be comparable to that of the pros. This MUST be achieved by consistent practicing of scales and specific patterns.
That is the distinction between an amateur and a pro. A professional plays his part PERFECTLY, while an amateur plays the part so that it sounds good enough to a common audience.
If you want to skip my story and just get to know what to do, skip down to the section, “What I Should have Done”. If you’re interested in a good story, read on.
How good do you want to be?
The logical question from this is how good do you want to be? Certainly, not everybody wants to be as good as a professional guitarists. More importantly, not everybody has the time to reach that level.
It has been opined that it takes 10,000 hours to reach mastery, about 9 years of practicing 3 hours a day. Many people look at guitarists like Paul Gilbert and wonder what trick they used to get that good. I think it more likely that someone like him has been playing and drilling consistently for decades to reach that level. If you take a look at most professional guitarists, the most common feature is that they focus as hard as they can for blocks of time in drilling a certain set of skills.
What I did through the years
I did not bring this mindset to the table when I started out. I started playing guitar when I was 14, and being the typical high school kid, I wanted to look cool. My mission then was to be someone who was fit (I was in track and field), smart (get good grades), and yet was well versed in music. I was playing the piano at this point in time, but everybody played the piano.
Becoming the ‘best’ electric guitarist in school was a straight ticket to greatness.
Hence, my focus was:
(1): Play popular songs that were just out of the reach of most guitarists
(2): Get good enough with all sorts of techniques (bending, vibrato, sweep picking!, etc)
(3): Play only the songs that I loved playing so that I would continually play them
At the time, the song Canon in D by Jerry C was really popular, so I shot for that song. I ended up performing it in front of the school at the beginning of Year 10 (secondary 4), only about 13 months after strumming my first note. The vid is still up on youtube.
What I did ‘right’
One notable feature was that I progressed at an astounding rate compared to my other friends who were took guitar lesson or were classically taught. I think there were four reasons.
First, instead of practicing scales, I practiced songs. I played things that were practical. Because of this, I learned all sorts of techniques, from economical picking (which I now don’t use), to bending, to tapping to sweeping. These complimented each other and helped me progress faster.
Second, I went on to something new when I though I was good enough, not when someone else (teacher) thought I was good enough. I also recorded some of my playing, to see if people would think that I was good enough. This meant that my playing was very good to the layman, though a professional might disapprove.
Third, because I was playing all the songs that I loved (Iron Maiden was my favourite), I put in probably 1-2 hours on weekdays and up to 6 hours on weekends.
Fourth, I had a musical background to begin with, and am blessed with pretty big hands. I have to face the fact that I was already a piano player and thus my finger dexterity was better than most. I also knew how to ‘play by feel’ to a certain extent. Lastly, my left index finger to my pinky can stretch comfortably from the 5th to the 12th fret on most electric guitars.
These came together to make me look like I was a great player to most people, and it won me a reputation as one of the better players in the state.
The Good and the Bad
I now reflect back on that and see that I did many things that were good for my technique and others that were bad.
Let’s talk about the bad first.
Because I practiced so many things to the level of good and not great, my technique was sloppy when it came to the task. Of course, no one caught this, since playing at high speeds seems magical to most people, including fellow guitarists [2]. That bred the next problem, which was that I thought that I could continue on doing this.
Because I was seen as a great guitarist for a high school kid, everything was really good, and it fed my ego as well as some bad habits which I had to eventually unlearn (which I’m doing now). Either way, if I continued doing what I was doing, I wouldn’t get much better.
The good was that by doing things so broadly, I obviously got a lot of attention. Playing at various gigs as a 16 year old was a seriously fun thing to do. At the same time, because of my wide interest and background in music theory, I wrote some of my own songs which I also played in front of various audiences.
What I Should Have Done
However, something changed when I got out of high school, and that was the realisation that if I wanted to be good, I had to be as good as the professionals. I was being judged in a whole different way, more demanding and ruthless.
I then realised that I had to take a good look at my practicing methodology.
This is when I started to take the lessons I saw online more seriously. I decided to practice without effects, which make you sound better than you really are, and practice with a clean guitar sound. I paid attention to every note that I hit wrongly and every time I did not play something in time. I also tried to practice many different scales and licks. My favourite list of such can be found at guitar dreams, with part 1, and part 2. These exercises have now formed the foundation of every practice session.
Finally, I experimented with various ways of picking and fretting. From all alternate picking, to economical. From pick angle, to how hard I picked to the plane in which I picked. And so on. I focused on getting things right with the least amount of tension and to be able to play each one consistently well. I really blocked out periods of time where all I did was focus on practicing guitar. This naturally served to bolster and re-ignite my passion for playing, and it is what I want to do in the future.
Finally, and probably most importantly, I look up to several guitarists who can be qualified as virtuosos and recognise that in due time (probably 7-10 years from now), I will be able to be at a comparable level to these people.
What I should have done back then was to integrate these two approaches. I should have structured my practice sessions such that half of it was strict technical work and half of it was playing anything I liked. This would have kept the interest level high, advanced my technique, and yet made me look good in front of my peers.
Hence, I do not think that the traditional method of teaching is the most optimal. A traditional teacher will bring the learner through a set step of progressions which may or not be conducive for the equally important parameters of technique and interest level. One without the other is certainly going to leave the learner ultimately dissatisfied.
With that, I wish you good luck, and I hope that this story can help you review your practice methods for better progress.
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Notes:
[1] Professional Guitarists here is referring to the professional guitarists which I draw inspiration from. These tend to be the instrumentalists, most notably, Paul Gilbert, Steve Vai and Buckethead.
[2] I have found that when you first start out learning something at a high speed, it all sounds like a mess. When you reduce it down to lower tempos, it doesn’t sound like anything with any resemblance to the original piece at all. Once you do learn it, you can distinctly hear and recognise each note, but yet played slow and fast, the same series of notes sounds different. This distinction must be even more blurry for those who are not musically inclined.
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